My ENT specialist says my child's hearing is perfectly fine, but your assessment seems to say otherwise

Listening and hearing are two closely linked but fundamentally different things: one is the physical process of perceiving sounds, the other is the way we interpret those sounds and make sense of them.

1. Hearing:

   • Hearing is the physiological, sensory process by which the ear picks up sound waves and turns them into electrical signals. These signals are then carried to the brain by the auditory nerve.
   • Hearing is therefore a biological and mechanical function that lets us detect sounds, whether or not we are paying attention to them or even aware of them.
   • It is a passive process: we hear sounds all the time, even when we are not actively focusing on them.

2. Listening:

   • Listening, on the other hand, is an active process. It involves not only receiving sounds (hearing) but also paying attention to them, understanding them and interpreting them.
   • Listening takes a conscious effort to understand the message being conveyed, whether through speech, music or any other form of sound communication.
   • It has cognitive and emotional sides: the listener engages with the information received, puts it into context and responds to it appropriately.
   • Listening also involves the ability to filter out distractions and focus on particular sounds, such as following a conversation in a noisy place.

So, to answer the question: if your ENT specialist tells you that your child hears perfectly well, they are talking about hearing.

Our listening assessment (audio-psycho-phonological assessment), by contrast, points to difficulties in the active process of listening: attention, understanding, filtering, focusing on and decoding sounds.

Hence the saying: “You can hear well and still listen badly!”