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I Can Hear, But I Can't Understand
by Dr. Leah Mitchell
Hearing Rehab Center-Northglenn
One of the most common statements audiologists hear is, "I can hear, I just can't understand." Without getting too technical, hopefully this helps to explain this common statement.
Speech is made up of many different frequencies or pitches. When hearing loss occurs, it does not necessarily occur equally across all frequencies. For example, someone could have normal hearing for low pitch tones but hearing loss of any degree for high frequency sounds. When this occurs, the individual hears the low pitch sounds of speech well, but not the high pitch sounds of speech. Low pitch speech sounds are typically louder and include all the vowel sounds. The vowels are the power behind our speech and really give it volume.
However, if all you hear are the vowels, things are going to sound very muffled and unclear. We need to hear the consonants in order to have the clarity and understanding of what is being said. Examples of high frequency consonants sounds include: "s, th, f, t, k." While low frequencies provide the volume, high frequencies provide the clarity and give words their meaning.
When a person is missing these high frequencies, just making things louder doesn't necessarily make things clearer. Those with high frequency hearing loss may find themselves increasing the TV volume to try to make it "clearer." Once it's turned up they "think" it's clearer only to find that they then feel it is too loud, and not comfortable or actually clearer.
Hearing loss typically comes on very gradually. So, even when a person starts to miss some of these sounds, they may not notice it right away. At first we can automatically fill in the blanks, where the sounds we don't hear well should be. The brain may do this quickly, without a person noticing, by using the information around the missing sounds. Or, a person starts to rely more and more on speech reading. It is normal to use visual cues to help understand speech, even with normal hearing. The problem is that as hearing loss gets worse, a person becomes more and more dependent on the visual cues because they are missing the auditory cues. At first it can be easy to keep up with a conversation if you only miss a word here or there but when there are more and more words that are missed, it becomes much more difficult to fill in those blanks.
Click here for Dr. Mitchell's complete article. |
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