Hearing Loss

It is important to note initially that hearing loss is not an all-or-nothing proposition but rather one that rather must be measured on a continuous scale. Moreover, acuity of hearing is not measured along the one-dimensional scale of loudness; clinicians testing for hearing loss must also consider whether a person can hear equally well at different sound frequencies.

Any testing undertaken to determine potential hearing loss must include a recognition of the client's age, for while even moderate hearing loss in a child may indicate the need for some form of treatment, hearing loss in an older client may simply be the result of age-induced hearing loss, or presbycusis. Hearing loss does occur with age, although it may be the accumulation of tissue and nerve degeneration, the secondary effects of drugs (including quinine and streptomycin), and increased likelihood of infection rather than age per se that produces age-related hearing loss (Noble 185).

One of the very first determinations that a clinician must make vis-a-vis hearing loss is to determine the degree of loss. Hearing loss may range

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Keller and Gopnick 146). Broca's aphasia is also marked by agrammatism or the loss of the fundamental rules used to assemble words into language (Keller in Keller and Gopnick 148). Anomic aphasia is the condition of being unable to recall the names of objects and is associated with Wernicke's aphasia while global aphasia is marked by deficiencies in all areas of language use from writing to naming to syntax. However, while the typology of aphasia is well established, it is now recognized as being limited in its usefulness for therapeutic purposes. This may be because a syndrome (like Broca's aphasia) is too broadly defined to be useful or because, when an aphasic syndrome is more narrowly defined such as Wernicke's aphasia, precise connections do not exist between specific patients and that narrowly defined syndrome. Caplan summarizes this problem: Operating at the level of the traditional clinical aphasic syndromes tends to trivialize language, its processing, and its disorders. Because it lumps together so many different types of impairments, it tends to lead the clinician to ignore the details of a patient's language impairment (Caplan 431-2). Caplan's strategy in overcoming this problem is to create a detailed diagnosis of
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Approximate Word count = 2719
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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