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ryancher

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As previously discussed in many of my other threads.

Even though Tyler "should" hearing with his hearing aids on - this may not be the case. Why not?

Also... the whole clarity issue when amplifying.

My inlaws have SERIOUS issues with Tyler and his hearing loss and I was hoping to provide them with a video or info to help them understand what we are slowly learning.
 
He is hearing, he just may not be able to understand speech. There is a difference. He would be able to hear a horn honk, or a siren, or even you clapping your hands, but that doesn't mean he'll be able to hear the difference between the "nnn" and "mmm" sound or "buh" vs "puh", which would be crucial to understanding speech through listening.
 
ryancher said:
My inlaws have SERIOUS issues with Tyler and his hearing loss and I was hoping to provide them with a video or info to help them understand what we are slowly learning.
Click to expand...

What do you mean by that? They think of him as a lesser person?
 
Type, Degree, and Configuration of Hearing Loss

"Sensorineural hearing loss occurs when there is damage to the inner ear (cochlea) or to the nerve pathways from the inner ear (retrocochlear) to the brain. Sensorineural hearing loss cannot be medically or surgically corrected. It is a permanent loss.

Sensorineural hearing loss not only involves a reduction in sound level, or ability to hear faint sounds, but also affects speech understanding, or ability to hear clearly"

Degree of hearing loss refers to the severity of the loss. The numbers are representative of the patient's thresholds, or the softest intensity at which sound is perceived. The following is one of the more commonly used classification systems:

Degree of hearing loss Hearing loss range (dB HL)

Normal -10 to 15
Slight 16 to 25
Mild 26 to 40
Moderate 41 to 55
Moderately severe 56 to 70
Severe 71 to 90
Profound 91+
 
Hearing Loss Help Why Do People Still Have Problems Understanding Speech When Wearing Hearing Aids?

Why Do People Still Have Problems Understanding Speech When Wearing Hearing Aids?


by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.


A man wrote:

My question is about hearing aid effectiveness. I notice that some people talk about having hearing aids but still having problems hearing. At the price that hearing aids go for, while I don’t expect to have Superman’s hearing, I thought I would be getting rid of the mumbles. I would expect issues such as background noise, certain sounds amplified that you don’t want to hear etc, but I do expect to understand what people are saying at a conversational level, even on the phone. Why are people having problems understanding conversational speech?

That is a good question. Let me explain. You need to realize that when hearing loss occurs, a number of things happen.

First, obviously, there is a hearing loss. If this was all that happened, then hearing aids could easily fix this problem by providing exactly the right amount of amplification at each frequency to make up for the hearing loss.

But this is not all that happens. Coupled with hearing loss is a decrease in the ability to discriminate between similar sounds. Thus speech, even when at a comfortably loud level, sounds “fuzzy” or “muddy”. You hear people talking, but just can’t quite understand what they are saying. Amplifying this just makes louder “fuzzy”. It does little to make it clearer.

It’s analogous to wearing glasses. If your glasses are ground wrong (fuzzy) you see everything fuzzy. But if your glasses are ground correctly, you expect to see clearly. But this does not always happen because the “fuzzy” may be in the lens of your eye. The light passes clearly though your glasses, but then gets “messed up” as it passes through your “fuzzy” lens.

This is exactly what happens with hearing. The amplified sounds may pass clearly through your hearing aids–but then they hit the “fuzzy” cochlea and you hear distorted speech. This is not the fault of the hearing aids, but of a damaged auditory system.

This is why we call hearing aids “hearing aids“—they are aids to better hearing, not the cure for poor hearing.

The worse your discrimination scores, the less you can expect hearing aids alone to help you. For example, with my hearing aids, my discrimination is approximately 62% or so. This means that out of every 100 words spoken, and when amplified properly for my hearing loss, I still don’t understand 38 of them. That is why I always speechread at the same time—to fill in the “fuzzy” words.
 
Understanding Audiograms, Hearing Loss, and Speech Intelligibility

"These factors play a big role in our ability to understand speech. For one thing, the great majority of people with hearing loss lose it in the higher frequencies, where the consonants lie. This is especially true of hearing loss due to aging. So a lot of older people hear the vowels but not the consonants. In addition, since consonants are spoken more softly, they tend to get drowned out in background noise."

(Tech note: Remember how we said earlier (Decibels) that every 10 dB increase or decrease doubles or halves the perceived loudness of the sound? Keeping that in mind, we can see that the "a" at 40 dB sounds twice as loud as the "p" (30 dB) and four times a loud as the "th" at 20 dB. The "e" (50 dB) sounds twice as loud as the "a", four times as loud as the "p", etc.)

So your typical person with hearing loss will have trouble hearing the consonants in the first place. He may be hanging on by a thread. Add a little background noise and he may lose them altogether. And since we're on the subject of speech intelligibility there is one more fact to consider:

3. Consonants convey most of the word information; they are much more important to speech intelligibility than vowels.

It is usually possible, for example, to figure out a word if you remove the vowels. But if you remove the consonants, you're lost. Try it yourself. Have a friend copy a line of text, leaving out the vowels. See if you can decipher the words. Then have him copy another line, this time leaving out the consonants. You'll find that it's pretty much impossible to reconstruct the original text.

Putting it together:

Consonants are more important than vowels in understanding speech.
Consonants are spoken more softly than vowels, and they tend to get drowned out in noisy environments.
Consonants are higher-pitched than vowels and and most hearing loss occurs in the higher frequencies.

As you can see, in a normal conversation this person will simply not be able to hear many of the consonants.
 
Bottesini said:
What do you mean by that? They think of him as a lesser person?
Click to expand...

Absolutely... and they would probably admit that. They don't understand him and they think of him as just "bad" because of his behaviours.

I get VERY protective and then I get criticized for that.

They don't understand hearing loss nor do they care to understand. Even though I sign SEE with him all the time - they never both to learn or ask questions. Heck, I don't even think they'd know how to put in his aids - they still freak when there's a slight feedback. grrrr....
 
Any Youtube videos explaining this faire_jour. I really don't think they'd even bother to spend time reading it.
 
ryancher said:
Any Youtube videos explaining this faire_jour. I really don't think they'd even bother to spend time reading it.
Click to expand...

I was hoping this would actually help you understand better too. If you go to the last website I posted, it has a good diagram of a moderatly severe hearing loss and what they can and can not hear.
 
Here is a little video. It isn't perfect but it should help

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EJ4g3J6cJM&feature=related]YouTube - Hearing Loss Example[/ame]
 
Excuse my ignorance... I need an explanation for the inlaws.

Why can't a hearing aid amplify hearing to "normal" levels?

Any websites or info would be helpful to explain this.
 
remember that speech banana I showed you AllDeaf.com - View Single Post - Loudness

Once your hearing begins to deteriorate we lose these hairs in our cochlea called cillia (i think thats what they're called cant member) and the reason why people have hearing loss is because these hairs get damaged and no longer work. These "hairs" are all over the cochlea and every spot in the cochlea represents different frequencies if there are too many "hairs" damaged in these frequencies the harder it is for the hearing aid to amplify it because all the hearing aid does is amplify for the ear the sound so it can hear it but if there is no "hairs" to pick up that sound it just won't be heard or heard properly. A lot of us can hear words but can't distinguish them because we don't hear parts of the word
 
ryancher said:
Excuse my ignorance... I need an explanation for the inlaws.

Why can't a hearing aid amplify hearing to "normal" levels?

Any websites or info would be helpful to explain this.
Click to expand...

Hearing aids only amplify sound, they don't fix the disfunction inside the cochlea. The reason your son has a hearing loss is because the hair cells inside the cochlea are missing, dead or broke. The hearing aid just makes things louder, it doesn't replace those hairs.
 
Hearing aids only amplify, and only to a degree based on the severity of loss.

I am in the 100-110 db loss range, and when I wear my HAs, the HAs put me in the 40-50 db loss range. So that means, aided, I can "hear" everything anyone else can hear at 40-50 db. However, speech is in the 30 db range so I don't have the ability to distinguish most speech sounds. So "normal levels" can only go so far, and if it's still out of the speech range that is still lost.
 
Yes, I understand most of that.

My question is... Tyler has a 65-75 decibel loss. So, there are 2 Naida's - super power and ultra powered. If the super powered couldn't amplify his hearing to speech level - couldn't we choose the ultra and bring his hearing to an even better level.

Do you see what I'm saying... is there anyway to amplify to a "normal" hearing range? I know the hearing would never be normal - but I mean within the "normal" speech range.

Do I make sense?
 
I understand your question better now that I know his DB loss. However, I can't say whether his HAs can get Tyler to a speech range. Only your audi could tell you that. There is such a thing as "too much" with the HAs -- for example, mine go to a volume of 4, with 1 being the lowest and 4 being the loudest. However, I cannot wear mine past 2.5 because everything gets too loud to the point of sheer distortion, and provides a constant stream of feedback higher than 2.5. So even with high-powered HAs that I cannot wear to 4, I still can't get in the speech range.
 
He is right in the hardest range, he can get into the speech range, but it will likely be too quiet to be able discriminate all the speech sounds. He will be able to get around 30 db, but that still leaves out a lot of speech. Remember, 30 db will be the QUIETEST he can hear. If I spoke just loud enough for you to hear that there is a sound, you (OF COURSE) wouldn't be able to understand what I am saying. That is what 30 db sounds like to him (it is 0 db for you) so 60 db (conversational speech) would sound like a whisper to him...so, just like you hearing a whisper, if there is any background noise or a fan or anything else, it becomes completely impossible to hear. And just like a whisper, sometimes things will be too quiet to hear, even in quiet.

At 30 db, there will be speech sounds that will be impossible for him to hear. Unfortunatly, they are sounds like "s", which is the single most important speech sound in English.

And at a 65 db loss, it is unlikely that he could ever be aided higher than 25-30 db.
 
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