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Do People Sound Like They're Mumbling? About 95% of persons who suffer hearing loss (due to aging) lose it in the higher frequencies. If this applies to you, you'll find that you're not able to hear higher-pitched sounds as well as you used to, like birds singing or crickets chirping. It's also harder to understand conversations because you're missing many of the consonants, which are higher-pitched than the vowels. Some consonants are not heard at all, and others like "stair" and "chair" are easily confused. Furthermore, it's the consonants that tend to separate words from one another. They act as “break points.” So if you can't hear the consonants clearly, what you get is a stready stream of sounds, all running together. As a result, people sound like they are mumbling. And as you would expect, a high frequency loss makes it even harder to understand the higher-pitched voices of women and children. |