Using the Ling 6-Sound Test Everyday

Assistant Professor
University of Central Arkansas

Patti F. Martin, M.S., CCC-A
Director of Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology
Arkansas Children's Hospital

Dee M. Lance, Ph.D., CCC-SLP
Assistant Professor
University of Central Arkansas

Introduction:

It seems that in our high-tech world, many of us believe we must have a piece of equipment with tons of bells and whistles to perform almost any kind of assessment. In our continuing effort to obtain the biggest, best, and most powerful assessment instruments, it's easy to overlook tried and true procedures.

The Ling Six Sound Test (Ling 1976, 1989) is one procedure that, in our experience, is often overlooked. One of its many benefits is that it can be used by anyone; audiologists, speech language pathologists, teachers and parents. The Ling Six Sound Test will truly get to the "nuts and bolts" of speech and hearing without all the "bells and whistles." It can be used with hearing aids, cochlear implants, or no amplification at all. It's a good "low tech" tool to keep handy for quick and accurate assessment of essential communication abilities of adults and children.

Historical Perspectives:

The concept behind Daniel Ling's Six Sound Test was to select familiar speech sounds that would broadly represent the speech spectrum from 250-8000 Hz. This spectral range is the same range tested by conventional audiometry. Ling used isolated phonemes to target low, middle and high frequency sounds.

The phonemes for the Ling Six Sound Test are [m], [ah], [oo], [ee], [sh] and [s]. There are many ways to use this test to assess functional listening skills. A short review of the hierarchy of auditory skills will be helpful in thinking of ways to use the Ling Six Sound Test.

Erber (1982) described a four level hierarchy of auditory skills with respect to sounds: detection, discrimination, identification and comprehension. Additionally, some of these same topics have been addressed in the psychoacoustics literature (Small, 1973).

Detection is the most basic auditory skill (Tye-Murray, 1998). Detection is the awareness of the presence or absence of sound. It is the most basic level of sound perception. Detection is probably best illustrated by a comprehensive audiologic evaluation. Pure tone testing is accomplished by asking a person to respond to sound when they hear it. Their response can take many different forms. Infants and young children may respond by turning their head towards the sound. A pre-schooler may respond by using a play task (i.e. dropping a block in a bucket when they hear a sound). Raising your hand or saying "yes" when you hear a sound such as an adult would do, is also a form of sound detection.

Discrimination is the ability to tell if two sounds are the same or different. In many discrimination tasks, the goal is to identify the smallest difference between two sounds, which the listener can perceive. To discriminate between two sounds, the listener must first be able to detect the two sounds. Therefore, discrimination is a "higher level" task than is detection.

Identification involves being able to label or name the sound that is heard. Identification tasks require that the listener be able to detect and discriminate the stimuli and then to uniquely identify it. Identification is a "higher level" task than is detection and/or discrimination.

Comprehension is the most complicated auditory skill, as it requires the listener to detect, discriminate, identify and understand the meaning of the sound or the message. Comprehension is the highest of the four levels as it bridges the auditory perception with cognitive and/or language abilities.

The Ling Six Sound Test is useful for addressing the skills of detection, discrimination and identification, but it is not a test of comprehension.