During your hearing testing, you were probably asked to repeat certain words at a comfortable level. This test is a evaluation of word discrimination or speech understanding. It gives your company hearing healthcare professional a small glimpse at how you perform in addition to understand speech in one-on-one conversations. A number of words pick up, asked to be repeated, and a percent correct score is certainly calculated based on the responses. The percentage calculated is the percentage for speech that you would understand in an ideal setting (e. g., quiet, without distraction, and at a level loud enough/comfortable for you to hear).

It is possible to have a significant amount of hearing loss, most surely have good word discrimination/speech understanding. However , without good input, you may lose more and more of your comprehension ability in time. Our brains crave input to function properly. When a man or women has a hearing loss, part of that input is denied. The very sounds that you can no longer hear are not being sent just for interpretation. For example , if you have a high pitch hearing loss, then some substantial pitches are missing from the incoming sound (e. he. in the word 'sat', 's' and 't' are both huge pitch sounds, only 'a' may be heard). Over time this lack of input leads to a deprivation situation in the neural. If the input is not coming in, the brain simply forgets easy methods to code that input and moves on to something else. If ever the sound is reintroduced at a later date with a hearing aid, it will be troublesome for the brain to understand what to do with that sound - plus speech may sound more garbled. In essence, the more you wait - the more danger there is to your word discrimination/speech understanding!

Because the brain is ever-learning, and ever-changing, if you "don't use it, you lose it". It moves on to a more important work. Even if your hearing does not change over the years, your presentation understanding could most definitely get poorer. An auditory-rich conditions that can be provided by the use of hearing instruments is crucial to sustaining your hearing.

If too long of a period of time has passed since your hearing loss began, hearing aids will not provide optimal benefit. Whereas your aids will still make sounds loud good enough for you to hear, your brain may not process as well, and your conversation understanding may still be poor. Wearing aids cannot avoid hearing loss that is going to progress, but it may help preserve your dialog understanding ability.