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Can you hear me now? Study says more teens can't

“Pump it (louder),” say the Black Eyed Peas in their 2006 hit single, which according to a recent study, teens might be obeying.

Nearly one in five teens has hearing loss, up roughly 5 percent from an earlier period, says a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The study compared teens tested between 1988 and 1994 to teens tested between 2005 and 2006.

Robert Novak, Purdue professor and Speech, Language, and Hearing Science department head, said studies such as these detect auditory thresholds, or the softest tone a person can hear half of the time it is presented.

Speech is normally in the 2,000 to 6,000 kilohertz range which carries information on consonant and vowel identity, Novak said. Hearing these frequencies is crucial to understanding language.

“If (children) don’t hear the ‘s’ at the end of twins, they don’t know if you are talking about one or both.”

Also important is the ability to pick up these frequencies at a reasonable volume. For children, the standard for normal is a decibel hearing level of 15 or lower. Lacking the normal ability to hear can negatively affect learning.

“Our language is very much dependent on hearing these teeny tiny sounds,” Novak said.

In the study, most of the teens had slight hearing loss, which falls in the 15 to 25 decibel hearing level range. A decibel hearing level greater than 25 signifies mild or worse hearing loss.

Read the full story at the Purdue Exponent.

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