NEW YORK — How well can you understand speech in a noisy setting?
Difficulty doing that is a hallmark of what’s called “hidden hearing loss.” Now, with the help of an exercise prepared for the Associated Press by the Mailman Center for Child Development at the University of Miami, you can give it a try, below.
You will be asked to repeat a series of sentences. The exercise begins in quiet, but then it will introduce background noise. The noise comes in six levels, faint at first but eventually louder than the words.
People with hearing loss start to have some trouble understanding the words at the second or third level, according to Robert Fifer, director of audiology and speech pathology at the center. That doesn’t mean that they can’t understand anything, but they show increasing difficulty understanding accurately what is said compared to someone with normal hearing abilities, he said.
The same appears to be true for people with normal scores on the standard hearing test called an audiogram, but who appear to have a loss of nerve connections associated with hidden hearing loss, he said.
— Malcolm Ritter
I missed the last 3. Should I look into getting a hearing aid?
Sounds like what you’d expect at a normal hearing test https://saywhathearing.com/en/hearing-loss/what-to-expect-at-your-hearing-test
Was born deaf in one ear, am now middle aged, and frequently have trouble making out what people say in noisy environments so I was already expecting a bad result even before taking the test. But I was remarkably surprised that I got all the sentences. I believe I didn’t hear or I misheard a few words. (Disclosure: I was using headphones so sound quality was better and it insulated me from sounds in the room)
I missed the last two.
Good exercise but you could have found a guy with a less robotic voice and clearer diction.
Interesting. Know I missed one but got the next