Clinical Implications of Nonverbal Methods of Hearing Aid Selection and Fitting

Two recent articles present excellent classifications of hearing-aid selection procedures (Levitt, 1978; Harford, 1979). As is often the case with classifications, these articles show that the same set of facts can be seen from different perspectives and can be subdivided into different families with totally different nomenclatures. A great thinker stated that the ability to order things into likes and unlikes is the foundation of human thought (Bronowski, 1951). Thus, a proliferation of classifications should be seen as continued attempts to understand a very complex set of data. The complexity involved in such comparisons demands that all pertinent data be looked at from as many angles as possible in order to appreciate the clinical implications of each procedure.