Results of research on auditory training have been pretty varied and inconsistent, and it’s something that researchers are still pursuing because there’s a general feeling that there’s something there and that if we can figure out the optimal method of training it would be beneficial to those with hearing loss, hearing aids, and implants. But one of the biggest issues has been that we seem to often be able to see training benefits within the particular tasks that are trained, but generalization to other day-to-day tasks is poor, or is harder to measure.
When I think about the value of auditory training, I tend to think about a few different things:
Audibility matters. If you simply cannot hear an /s/ sound or a /t/ sound, no amount of auditory training will help with that. This is something that one has to chase with their clinician, and the chase is going to be fairly individual and bounded by individual limits.
Neurons that fire together wire together. You can increase the strength of a neural representation with repetition of a clear stimulus. There’s some interesting work looking at improvements in EEG response to auditory stimuli in children with auditory processing disorder before an after some time (months) using on-ear remote microphone technology. What the remote mic is doing for these children is simply presenting a clear speech signal at supra-threshold levels for hours a day (these children are typically using the devices to hear the teacher throughout the school day). Note that the EEG improvements are seen without the devices–that is, the time using the remote mics appears to be rehabilitative not just supportive.
Literature on the benefits of musical training on areas like reading and hearing in noise, while varied, tends to suggest that passive music listening isn’t enough and you have to engage with it. Similarly, individuals who are memory champions do it by creating broad neural networks–its easier to retreive a memory when you have multiple paths to it rather than just one. Hearing, seeing, producing speech is likely more powerful, from a neural connectivity perspective, than just hearing it alone.
Training, learning in pretty much all areas of human experience, physical and cognitive, is asymptotic (bigger gains earlier), related to difficulty (once you plateau on the easy stuff you need to push to harder things to see more improvement), and requires maintenance. Conscious auditory training will probably show bigger benefits earlier in hearing aid or cochlear implant use, and bigger benefits for those who have further to go. People who are regularly performing reasonably well in complex environments will probably also need it less. Consider who probably needs more time at the gym, the guy who works a desk job or the guy who works his farm all day. Anecdotally, I have had a lot of people, even with normal hearing, reporting declines in speech-in-noise ability through the pandemic, which makes sense if everyone spent two years sitting at home in quiet spaces. Use it or lose it, and if you don’t have natural reasons to use it regularly you have to create reasons.
And finally, we’re not going to do the things in the long-term that we don’t enjoy. Reading aloud might be useful for some people for a little while, but it’s probably only enjoyable in the long-term for a smaller subset of people. Raudrive mentioned what worked for him with his implants was listening to and reading his favourite shows. Bookworms might like a read-along audiobook approach. You’re really just hunting for repetitive, clear, complex auditory stimulus exposure (i.e. speech) and there are probably countless ways to do this. Some people are podcast people, and listening to something you find interesting while walking or working will count as auditory training. Some people are very social and setting up a situation where you can interact with friends (maybe with remote mics to promote a clear signal) will be sustainable. Maybe some people like to read aloud to a grandchild, or participate in local theatre (that would be a lot of reading aloud and memorizing and responding to others). Some people like musical training, or singing in a choir. Some people like a gamified computer training system where they can see progress on graphs.
