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HEARING LOSS AFFECTS YOUR SPEECH PERCEPTION

Understanding your type of hearing loss is crucial to providing the best hearing solution. Like a fingerprint, your ear and hearing loss is unique to you. Almost everyone with hearing loss can benefit greatly from a properly fitted hearing instrument.

Sensorineural Hearing Loss:

This is the most common type of hearing loss. It occurs in the inner ear. This hearing loss often affects higher pitched speech sounds such as “s,” “f,” “sh,” and “t.” These sounds play crucial roles in our ability to understand speech. This is why a person with sensorineural loss will often say, “I can hear but I often don’t understand what is being said.”

Conductive Hearing Loss

This hearing loss occurs in the outer or middle ear. Voices and sounds may be faint or distorted from a hearing loss in the low frequency range. Lower pitched sounds that provide the “volume” to speech, sounds such as “o” and “u,” are reduced. The loudness of incoming speech is affected, but usually not clarity.

Mixed Hearing Loss:

When hearing loss occurs both sensorineurally and conductively, then the condition is known as a mixed hearing loss.