Speech processing can fail independently of general hearing ability

Evidence

In addition to the effects of sensorineural impairments discussed above, speech discrimination can also be degraded due to impairments in the processes specifically responsible for speech processing. An individual may hear many sounds without problems but may still be unable to understand speech. For example, there may be problems in analysing the temporal structure of speech. This can depend on the pace of the speech, so that slow speech is intelligible, but as the pace increases, the auditory system cannot structure the speech into linguistic units. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 2671

Categorization

• SEED: Possible angle: dissociable auditory deficits — many people ‘hear fine’ but can’t parse fast speech — relevant to why captions help, or to audio design for accessibility.