Hidden Hearing Loss

What if you pass a standard hearing test, but you still feel like you have more difficulty understanding speech in noise than your family and friends?

The pure tone threshold audiogram may not pick up on all aspects of hearing loss. Sometimes the loss can be “hidden” on a hearing test, where you can still detect very soft sounds, but the processing of speech versus noise is affected.

Researchers led by Dr. Liberman at Mass Eye & Ear have been found that that noise exposure can damage the connections between hair cells and hearing nerve fibers which could lead to poorer speech understanding even when sound detection for soft sounds is normal. Detecting a soft sound only takes a few functioning nerve fibers, while separating out different speech signals is a much more complex task.

This is why we incorporate speech-in-noise testing in our test battery. Someone with only a slight to mild hearing loss, but poor scores on a speech in noise test can benefit with hearing aids with companion microphone technology.