A spoken memory test asks you to hold on to words and bring them back.
But first, the words have to reach you clearly enough to learn.
Receiving and remembering are not the same task. Poor audibility can lower recall even when memory is not impaired. A spoken recall score, by itself, cannot distinguish difficulty hearing the words from difficulty remembering them.
On the score sheet, either can leave the same absence: a word not recalled.
The risk is not only a lower number. It is what that number may be made to say about a person. Being told you forgot something you never heard clearly turns a difficulty receiving the words into an apparent failure of your mind. The barrier disappears from the explanation; the person is left carrying it.
That is why access is not merely a kindness offered alongside the test. Access to the words is a condition of measuring memory accurately. If audibility is uncertain, the meaning of poor recall is uncertain too.
This does not make hearing difficulty the answer to every low score. Hearing and memory difficulties can coexist. Checking audibility does not establish intact memory or rule out cognitive impairment. It improves the basis for interpreting what happened.
The method matters as well. Appropriate presentation and accommodations depend on the particular test. Arbitrary changes can affect whether a score remains comparable and how it can be interpreted. Making words accessible requires care, not simply making up a different test.
Before poor recall is treated as memory loss alone, hearing and audibility need to be checked using appropriate procedures.
The distinction is small enough to vanish inside a number, and large enough to change what we believe about someone: words that were not remembered, or words that were never clearly received.