Hörinput

Hörinput is a German term that denotes the auditory input reaching the human ear and the auditory system. It encompasses all acoustic stimuli available to the listener, including speech, music, environmental sounds, and noise. In everyday use, Hörinput can refer to the quantity and quality of sounds that a person receives from their surroundings.

In linguistics and psycholinguistics, Hörinput is a central concept for understanding speech perception and language acquisition. The richness of Hörinput—variety, repetitiveness, and intelligibility—affects phonological learning, vocabulary growth, and sentence processing. The term is often considered in studies of caregiver speech to children, where a high volume of high-quality Hörinput correlates with faster language development.

In audiology and hearing technology, Hörinput describes the signal that hearing devices capture and transform. Microphones in hearing aids and cochlear implants convert Hörinput into electrical or digital signals, which are then processed to compensate for hearing loss. In room acoustics and product design, measuring Hörinput is part of assessing how environments support listening, using metrics like signal-to-noise ratio and frequency content.

Research approaches range from naturalistic observations to controlled experiments and corpus analyses, aiming to quantify Hörinput in terms of duration, diversity, and intelligibility. The term remains descriptive rather than a fixed technical category and is applied mainly in German-language texts. See also Hörverarbeitung, Sprachentwicklung, Hörgeräte, Auditory stimuli, Language input.