Final answer:
A person with severe hearing loss will have difficulty with speech recognition in environments without hearing aids, struggling especially with higher frequencies and female voices. Hearing higher-pitched sounds and understanding speech clearly can be greatly compromised without the amplification that hearing aids provide.
Step-by-step explanation:
If a person with severe hearing loss is in an environment without hearing aids (HAs), they would greatly struggle with speech recognition, especially without the amplification that HAs provide. Normal conversational sounds fall within a frequency and intensity region that is often not fully perceived by someone with a 60-phon hearing impairment. They would hear only the lowest frequencies, making speech seem indistinct. Higher-pitched voices, like those of many women, would be particularly difficult to understand because of the higher frequencies characterizing these voices.
It is important to note that we do not use our full range of hearing in everyday life, with frequencies above 8000 Hz being rare in the environment. However, these frequencies include some important consonant sounds that are necessary for understanding speech clearly. Thus, a significant hearing loss at all frequencies, such as a 60-phon loss, can render speech recognition very difficult unless the sound is much louder than normal, potentially making communication without aids like HAs very challenging for the affected individual.