When “What did you say?” starts happening more often
By Rob Shilot, President of Beltone Hearing Aid Center
As the president of a Lowcountry hearing aid center, it is probably the most common complaint we hear. Sometimes it is a spouse speaking from another room. Sometimes it is television dialogue. Most often, it is conversation in a busy restaurant.
The person can hear that someone is talking, so from their perspective, they hear fine. The problem is that the words are no longer clear.
One of the first distinctions I make is the difference between loud and clear. The most common type of hearing loss we see is not a complete loss of sound. It is a gradual loss of access to certain parts of speech, especially softer, higher-pitched consonants.
Take the word “this.” The “th” sound is soft and high pitched. So is the final “s.” The “i” in the middle is a stronger vowel sound. If someone no longer hears the “th” or the “s,” what reaches them may sound more like “ih.”
As more words get clipped off, speech begins to run together. It can sound as though people are mumbling or speaking too fast. This becomes worse when you cannot see the speaker’s face, someone is talking from another room or there is competing noise.
Restaurants are often where people notice it first. In the quiet, we use context, facial expressions and nonverbal cues to fill in gaps almost as quickly as we miss them. In a crowded restaurant, competing sounds make those missing pieces harder to recover.
Television works much the same way. Many people hear commercials or the evening news clearly, but struggle with movies and dramas. A news anchor faces the camera, works in a quiet studio and is trained to speak clearly. In a dramatic scene, actors may speak off camera, use different accents or talk over music and sound effects. You hear the soundtrack but lose the dialogue.
Testing Speech Understanding
That is why a good hearing evaluation should measure more than whether you can hear a beep.
Pure tone testing shows the softest sound you can hear at each pitch. Speech discrimination testing shows how much speech you can understand.
At Beltone, we compare how much speech a patient understands with natural hearing, or with current hearing aids, to what that patient is capable of understanding. That helps us determine whether treatment is improving clarity.
Once testing is complete, I sometimes joke that we can finally settle the question: Is your wife really mumbling, or are you missing parts of her speech?
To you, she may truly sound unclear. Perception is reality.
Clearer, Not Simply Louder
A prescriptive hearing aid is designed to provide the precise amount of help needed at each frequency. Basic amplification may make everything louder, providing too much sound in some areas and not enough in others. Prescriptive technology aims to restore the speech sounds you are missing so words become clearer, not simply louder.
A thorough evaluation should include your history, real life examples, careful measurements and a clear explanation of what the results mean. That usually takes closer to an hour, not 15 minutes.
If you or someone you love identifies with these difficulties, you deserve to know what is causing them and what options are available. Beltone offers comprehensive hearing evaluations at no charge and with no obligation to pursue treatment. We will explain the results clearly, and only if testing shows that you are a candidate for treatment will we discuss those options with you.
