Auditory Training

Family Hearing Services has partnered with Aural Rehab Services, LLC to provide auditory training to our patients. Ms. Lisa Walker, a Speech Language Pathologist will provide auditory training to our patients with auditory processing disorder, hearing loss as well as cochlear implant users.

Lisa earned both her Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. She has been providing speech therapy services for both children and adults in schools, skilled nursing facilities, hospitals, outpatient clinics and private practice since 1995.

Lisa specializes in speech sound disorders, foreign accent modification, and auditory training for auditory processing disorders. Lisa is passionate about helping others communicate effectively in their home, school, work, and social environments. 

What is Auditory Training?

The goal of auditory training is to help improve working memory and increase auditory processing speed. For us to optimally understand conversations, our working memory is used to recall words and their context. When a hearing loss (or processing deficit) is present, our brains have a hard time understanding the conversation because the brain cannot accurately interpret the information fast enough. These skills have also been shown to decrease as we age.

The use of hearing aids and cochlear implants help us to detect sounds easier, but we often need to retrain the brain to better understand sounds and make sense of the information sent through the devices. Think of the hearing aids/cochlear implants as the hardware and your brain as the software. The sound goes through the ears, but it’s your brain that make these sounds meaningful to you.

Who can benefit from Auditory Training?

• People with hearing loss that use hearing aids but continue to struggle with word understanding and/or hearing in noise.
• People with an Auditory Processing Disorder (children or adults).
• People who use a Cochlear Implant.
• People who do not wear any devices but would like to improve their ability to hear in noisy places.