1. In a computer-implemented auditory training exercise for improving a person's acoustic processing abilities, wherein the auditory training exercise adaptively modifies a stimulus level of synthesized phonemes in an iterative manner based on the person's responses to those synthesized phonemes, wherein the stimulus level is characterized by one or more of the degree by which selected portions of the synthesized phonemes are made relatively more or less loud and the degree by which selected segments of the synthesized phonemes are temporally stretched, a method of progressively orienting the person to recognize a synthesized phoneme that consists essentially only of a formant-filtered representation of the phoneme, the method comprising: providing a first, relatively simplified representation of a phoneme, the first representation consisting of a formant-synthesized-filtered representation of the phoneme; providing a second relatively more spectrally complete representation of the phoneme thru synthesis using a naturalistic time-varying filter; blending different proportions of the first and second representations of the phoneme into different blended representations of the phoneme ranging from a most naturally-sounding representation of the phoneme to a least naturally-sounding representation of the phoneme; initially aurally presenting the most naturally-sounding representation of the phoneme to the person; and aurally presenting progressively less-naturally sounding representations of the phoneme to the person; wherein the auditory training exercise is implemented after the person completes the orientation.