Mentally replaying speech to understand it

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Recently realized I do this:

Sometimes when I'm listening to someone speak, trying to understand them, I'll fall behind in understanding them and realize they've stopped speaking and evidently need an answer--only I'm a sentence behind.

So I find myself replaying the information in my memory--just sounds, not words yet--a couple of times, and picking the words out of it that way! It seems like the information gets stored as a plain sound file for a while before I codify and interpret it as words, and possibly add it to long-term storage.

Do any of you guys do this?

Yes! I do exactly that!

oh yes. me too. :/

Yup, and sometimes my lips move while I'm doing it. Embarrassing. Or I will tell them to give me the big picture in a couple of sentences so I can respond to them.

Yes, absolutely! I think of it as my buffer. It makes me seem a bit glitchy during the delay, no doubt.

hear, hear!

Yes, I do that too.

Yeah, all the time.

As I said elsewhere, I have congenital auditory nerve damage causing my right ear to be totally deaf, and my left ear to be a noisy channel.

When someone says something, I experience two phases of processing:

1. The raw noise I hear. They may say "Did you go to the market?" and I will hear "Ninja Migo Spock fit."

Consciously, I try to ask myself it what I think I heard makes sense, and what it may be they really said. My reflexive response is "what?"

2. While I'm trying to consciously make sense of it, my subconscious is going much faster and interpolating what they actually said. Typically, by the time I have finished asking "what?" I will have an accurate conscious representation of what was actually said. By the time they start repeating it, I've already processed what they said the first time.

This has always fascinated me, and taught me many lessons about cognitive neuroscience.

I'm not sure... sometimes I feel like I only understand the sentence once it "echoes", and there's a feeling of time passing inbetween hearing the speech and understanding it. But other people don't seem to think I'm reacting slowly, and it's not conscious, I don't have any access to the raw sounds. It might be my time sense that's doing this, not my hearing.

Yes I have to do this too.
I may hear the correct words but not get the sense until i've silently repeated the words thinking about the context.

Another is hearing different words or just the sounds but without forming sensible words out of them. In all cases, this cues my 'thinking face' & run the risk of being told I 'look puzzled'.

If it's a conversation, unless it's an important point, I usually coast through it by standard phrases or vague responses. That's fine if people expect your responses to be odd, if they're always odd at least you're consistent!

Yep. All the time.

Tiffinity.