Final answer:
A person with severe hearing loss, represented by a 60-phon loss, has difficulties in speech recognition due to their inability to hear higher frequencies, with the effect being more pronounced for female voices due to their higher pitch. Hearing aids can amplify sounds but may not fully restore speech clarity.
Step-by-step explanation:
Individuals with a severe degree of hearing loss experience difficulty recognizing speech, especially when dealing with higher frequencies such as those present in female voices. This impairment affects their ability to perceive conversational speech clearly, even when using hearing aids (HAs). A person with a 60-phon hearing loss is mainly able to hear only the lowest frequencies, rendering speech indistinct. Since normal conversational sound, and particularly female speech, contains higher frequencies, understanding conversations becomes challenging without significant amplification.
Good speech recognition depends not only on the volume but also on the clarity of higher frequency sounds, which carry the consonant sounds of speech that differentiate words. For example, if a person has a 50-dB hearing loss at all frequencies, low-intensity sounds need to be amplified significantly to seem normal, but care must be taken to avoid further hearing damage. However, even with amplification, the speech heard can be muffled or unclear if the hearing aids do not adequately address the high-frequency losses.