As the title of the publication indicates, this a dictionary: A book of approximately 4000 entries covering many terms used in the diagnosis and treatment of hearing loss. The dictionary is intended for students, practitioners, and scholars in the fields of hearing, especially those involved with the clinical/audiological aspects of hearing. The dictionary provides the term, any acronyms, the part of speech (e.g., noun), current status of the term's use, usual pronunciation, plural/singular forms of the term, the term's etymology and brief onomastic information, known synonyms, and meaning/definition. In addition, the book includes a list of additional common acronyms used in hearing research and clinical practice. The definitions do not contain any equations or figures, and units of measurement are usually expressed in SI (Systèm International d'Unité) units. The author is a British audiologist, teacher of the deaf, and author of several books and other dictionaries in the field of audiology.
While it would always be possible to find terms not covered in a dictionary like this one, A Dictionary of Hearing misses very few. Those that I thought of (e.g., dead regions/zones or informational and energetic masking) were very current and mainly represented the more experimental, as opposed to clinical, aspects of hearing. The author's inclusion of the origin of many of the terms, especially regarding researchers and clinicians responsible for the term, added an enjoyable and informative aspect to what would normally be rather dry reading. While one might question the inclusion of many terms that are no longer used, I found the meaning of most of these terms to be informative in regards to their origins and the fact that the term was obsolete or had been replaced by a different term. The use of cross referencing was rather limited and somewhat idiosyncratic, requiring more “leafing back and forth” than I wanted to do. And, the same terms are sometimes defined somewhat differently in different parts of the book.
The dictionary's strength is also its weakness. The definitions are as the author indicates, “stated in clear and simple language.” Indeed, almost anyone would be able to glean the meaning of a term listed in the dictionary. Thus students and those not close to the field would gain an appreciation of the meaning of most of the 4000 terms listed in the dictionary. The informal style of definition comes at the cost of a lack of accuracy in some cases. A definition like that for emission, otoacoustic (OAE)’ as “Tiny sounds produced by the outer hair cells…” provides a hint of what an OAE might be, but “tiny” is not an appropriate characterization of sound.
My major disappointment about A Dictionary of Hearing is the lack of any reference to definitions and measurements that have been standardized both nationally and internationally. The list of acronyms in the dictionary contains ISO (International Standards Organization) and IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission), as well as the obsolete ASA (American Standards Association); neither ANSI (American National Standards Institute) nor Acoustical Society of America are listed. Moreover, no mention is made of the definitions of a large number of acoustic and psychoacoustic terms provided in several standards published by these organizations and used worldwide. In many cases, the differences between the definitions provided in A Dictionary of Hearing and those found in national and international standards are small and probably inconsequential; in other cases, the differences are significant. For instance, pitch is defined as “The individual listener's subjective impression of frequency. High-frequency tones are heard as high pitch and low-frequency tones are heard as low pitch.” Tying the term “pitch” to only the frequency of tonal sounds ignores 150 yr of research on pitch perception documenting the complex relationship between the term “pitch” and the acoustic conditions (e.g., the pitch of a person's voice) that lead to the perception of pitch.
What is good about A Dictionary of Hearing is the large number of terms that are defined, especially those dealing with diagnosing and treating hearing loss. I am not aware of dictionaries or other references that cover such a large number of terms. If A Dictionary of Hearing was used in combination with standardized definitions of terms and measurements, both students and professionals could discover useful meanings of terms used in the fields of hearing. And many, like this reviewer, are likely to enjoy the brief historical references to people in the field provided in the onomastic descriptions.
WIILIAM A. YOST
Speech and Hearing Science
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona 85287