How to deal with hearing impairment

Patients with sensorineural hearing loss often complain that “the sound is big enough, but not clear enough”, “the sound is sometimes too light to hear, sometimes too noisy and unbearable”, “heard well in a quiet environment, but listen when there is noise.” Cleared.”

In fact, these complaints arise because hearing loss has an impact on verbal intelligibility. So why does hearing loss reduce speech intelligibility?

The decline in verbal intelligibility caused by hearing loss mainly comes from four aspects:

1, audibility drops

The spectrum information of different voices is different. As the degree of hearing loss continues to increase, patients with sensorineural hearing loss often have a vague feeling of “sound loud enough but not clear enough” because they are unable to recognize certain speech components in speech.

The picture shows the spectrum analysis of the speech oo and ee. It can be seen that the first formant information of oo and ee is basically the same, and the second formant is different so that the sound is different.

When hearing loss occurs, hearing loss gradually affects the ability to distinguish sound information above 700Hz. Therefore, people with hearing impairments cannot distinguish between oo and ee (the gray area in the figure) because they cannot hear the second formant.

2, narrower dynamic range of hearing

The auditory dynamic range refers to the range of hearing sensibility from the moment the human ear can hear the sound to the unbearable feeling of the sound. The normal hearing is generally 100dB HL.

As hearing decreases, the range of auditory dynamics of patients with sensorineural hearing loss gradually narrows, thereby losing the ability to perceive different levels of acoustic information.

In the figure (a), the wider blue region is the normal auditory dynamic range, indicating that the normal hearing person can both perceive the small sound and does not feel loud and unbearable; while the auditory dynamic range of (b) in the figure is significantly reduced, thus Hearing loss patients can only hear loud voices and cannot perceive whispers.

3, weakened frequency resolution

Different sound information contains different frequency components. Under normal circumstances, these different sound messages can activate different parts of the cochlea, allowing the human ear to distinguish speech from noise.

However, as the degree of hearing loss increases, the sensitivity of the cochlea in patients with sensorineural hearing loss will gradually decrease. When the frequency of the noise is close to the frequency of the speech, the lower cochlear sensitivity will not be able to distinguish between the two frequency components, thereby causing the brain to lose the ability to recognize speech information from the noise.

4, time resolution is weakened

The background noise in daily life fluctuates greatly. When the noise intensity is at a low level, the normal hearing person can use this “short” time interval to extract the speech components in the information, thereby obtaining the ability to recognize speech in noise.

However, for patients with hearing loss, this ability will gradually disappear as the hearing loss increases. The more difficult the background noise in the environment, the more difficult it is to extract speech information.

　　Jinghao medical hearing aid reminder:Hearing aids need to be professionally “fitted”. It is very important to choose a professional hearing aid fitting center and hearing aid fittings! You can call the Jinghao medical for any hearing problems, or you can come to the center to experience the experience. . Hearing aid free consultation phone: +86-752-2299187

You can also email us: Jinghao14@jinghao.cc for more information you want to know.