Effects of Noise and Personal Hearing Protection on Hearing

Since high noise exposure causes various physiological changes in Che cochlea it is not surprising that many psychoacoustical changes also manifest themselves in people with hearing loss due to noise damage. Some of these psychoacoustical changes of the auditory system, such as temporary threshold shift, permanent threshold shift, speech perception, frequency resolution, and temporal integration are discussed in lay terms. The strategy to be used in noisy industries to reduce noise exposure of workers is also discussed with special attention to the use of personal hearing protection. The use of hearing protectors has different effects on people with different degrees of hearing loss. This paper also relates the effect of hearing protectors to some of the psychoacoustical changes due to noise damage.