An individual with high-frequency hearing loss has difficulty in understanding the speech with a high pitch such as of women and children and birds or the doorbell. Talking to family and friends over the telephone could be equally challenging. High frequencies help with speech understanding, because fricative sounds like S, H, and F are high in pitch. When hearing in the low frequencies is normal, also, hearing the loudness is normal and vowel sounds can still be heard easily. What is not easy is to make out important high-frequency consonant sounds.
The tiny hair cells at the base of cochlea process incoming sounds from external sources. Hair cells in the cochlea can be damaged by a number of factors, like noise, age, ototoxic medications and disease. Age-related hearing loss and noise-induced hearing loss often affect the high frequencies first rather than lower frequency.
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