Have you ever been in a conversation where you hear someone speaking but can’t quite make out the words? Maybe you pick up on the general sound but miss the meaning entirely—leaving you feeling like you’re putting together a puzzle with missing pieces.
Simple words like “bat” and “pat” or numbers like “thirteen” and “thirty” can blend, making conversations confusing and even draining. If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Many people with hearing loss face similar challenges. Let’s take a closer look at why this happens and how you can overcome it.
How Hearing Loss Affects Word Clarity
When someone calls out your order at Bagel Central, your ears collect the sound waves, transform them into electrical signals and send them to your brain, where they are recognized as speech. However, when you have high-frequency hearing loss, certain consonants and syllables may become muffled or distorted, leading to miscommunication.
Sound frequency is measured in Herz. The average human being can hear frequencies ranging from 16 to 16,000 Hz. Most speech sounds fall within the 300 to 3,000 Hz bracket. When you have high-frequency hearing loss of at least 30 decibels, human speech can start to feel difficult to comprehend. Most often, this distortion happens with consonants—like “s,” “h” or “f”—because they fall within the higher frequency range. So, even if you can hear vowels and some consonants, you may struggle to distinguish between similar-sounding words, making conversation seem unclear or incomplete.
Strategies to Help Improve Understanding
It’s easy to feel frustrated when you try to follow a conversation and lose track of the words. A few ways you can ease communication frustration include:
- Choose a quiet environment. When you have trouble understanding speech, a noisy environment probably isn’t the best place to talk with your friends. Try swapping busy restaurants or bars with calm coffee shops or park days for clearer understanding.
- Try auditory training. Auditory training is an amazing tool for people with hearing loss or auditory processing disorder (wherein they hear but do not understand speech). Many computer and smartphone apps are designed to help users practice recognizing specific words or using context clues to fill in missing information. Consider trying an auditory training app or contact Bangor Audiology for communication strategies to boost your listening and comprehension skills.
- Use hearing aids. Modern hearing aids are programmed to amplify the frequencies specific to your hearing needs. By boosting those high-frequency sounds that tend to get lost in translation, hearing aids can help sharpen your understanding of speech.
If you’re struggling to understand conversations or find yourself asking people to repeat themselves more often, contact Bangor Audiology today to discuss your treatment options with one of our trusted experts.