Relationship Between Severity of Hearing Loss and Speech Problems
The severity of the speech problem that you have can vary depending on the severity of your hearing loss. For example, if you have mild hearing loss, most of your speech problems would only include difficulty in the distinction of tense, plurality and possessives. Not hearing subtle conversational cues can also cause you to react inappropriately when talking to others.
When you have profound hearing loss, you can probably detect sound but not discriminate speech by wearing a hearing aide. In cases like this, speech alone is not enough to communicate; you would have to use other means of communication such as sign language and the like.
Since hearing loss during childhood is the kind of hearing loss that can affect your speech, you should get to know what are the risk factors and conditions that can lead to hearing loss during childhood.
Congenital hearing loss is the type of hearing impairment that is already present when you were born. Several factors and conditions can lead an infant into having congenital hearing loss.
Some of these factors include complications in pregnancy and delivery, mother\'s use of ototoxic drugs like antibiotics, use of abusive drugs, anoxia (lack of oxygen) during delivery, jaundice, and premature delivery. Different conditions of congenital hearing loss would be otosclerosis, and sensorineural conditions.
Sometimes, structures are the main problem of hearing loss at birth. There are times that babies have physical defects of not having an eardrum or one of their ossicles are not moving, which should not be the case for normal ear physiology.
Presence of syndromes like Achondroplasia, Alport\'s syndrome, Apert\'s syndrome, Crouzon\'s syndrome, Down\'s syndrome, Treacher-Collins syndrome, and Waardenburg\'s syndrome can cause congenital hearing impairment.
However, you can also acquire hearing loss while you\'re still an infant. If you have severe fever as a baby, and you were treated with very powerful antibiotics, this can lead to hearing impairment, along with having rubella, mumps, measles and chicken pox during infancy.