Difficulty hearing human voices- is this a common AS trait?

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My husband often gets very upset with me when I can't quite hear him, or decipher what he is saying. Sometimes I'll have to take a moment to 'replay' in my mind what was said before I'll get it. It's not like he's speaking too quietly or not clearly enough, but that sometimes makes it more difficult, especially if his face is turned away from me. What's weird is that I've been able to track down a cricket that's hiding in the house, or I'll hear things like sirens before he does. It's also a huge problem on cell phones and in face-to-face conversations with other people (instead of asking them to repeat themselves, I'll smile and nod, lol) Can anyone relate?

Here is something about it, http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt164892.html

Thank you

Yeah, welcome to the world of CAPD. Lots of us here have it.

One of us! One of us! Gooble gobble! Gooble gobble!

I often repeat what someone has said to me to buy time to comprehend it. It takes me a few seconds to "process" the meaning of their words.

Yes, typically the first sentence of an unanticipated verbal message is lost to me. It's loud enough, but unintelligible. After failing to catch the the first burst of sound, my brain "warms up" and I begin to understand what is being said. I used to ask people What? all the time but I got sick of asking and they got sick of answering, so now I just try to look attentive during the unintelligible sound burst and hope I will pick up the jist later on.

It remains a problem, though, since a lot of important human communications--warnings, greetings, insults--are one sentence or less.

What?
What did you say?
I'm sorry, can you say that again?
I'm sorry, I didn't catch that.
I'm sorry, can you draw a picture?



I hope no one thinks that I am doing all of the above on purpose. That's exactly what they think I'm doing, isn't it?

It came as a great shock to me when my mother told me that she could hear what I said perfectly fine in Walmart and also that Walmart is not loud at all.

Oh yeah, let me not forget raising my own voice to too-loud levels to subconsciously compensate for this problem that other people don't have! Basically, I exhibit a lot of the behaviors of someone with age-related hearing loss.

I've had a horrible time understanding speech against any kind of background noise as far back as I can remember.

For many flavors of rock music, I've never been able to hear and understand the lyrics to any song.

I still have a great deal of understanding conversations. I often have to ask a friend to repeat himself when in a group or in a restaurant.

My hearing is quite good as far as hearing sounds is concerned, but speech is a very different matter.

I tend to raise my voice in noisy situations because I can't hear myself well.

CAPD fits me quite well.

I have developed a bad habit of this.

"I want you to..."

"...uugh... yeah, sure, alright."

The slope of pretense is slippery, and there is a pit of vipers at the bottom.

I think this is called autotory prosessing disorder. I think I may have it as well because when people talk to me if often sounds like giberish. I've been tested for hearing loss umteen times but I just kinda space out during the test and it comes back inconclusive. If they truely want to see if I'm deaf, they need to test out my hearing the same way they do animals and babies.

This is a huge problem for me. People think I am hard of hearing because I always say "what? what? what?" Sounds awful all the time, but I can't help it. I actually have super sensitive hearing and notice many sounds others do not. Many small sounds bother me, and others do not even realize that they are there. We were in Subway the other day (my niece and I), and I must have said "what?" to the guy behind the counter about a dozen times, and he was clearly getting annoyed. I asked my niece when we left, "do you have any idea what he said in there?" and apparently she heard him loud and clear (and she has severe ADHD, and has trouble focusing on just about everything). That being said, the smallest sounds bother me, and she thinks I am crazy for even noticing them, let alone being bothered by them.

Sometimes I will say "what?" and then respond to what the person has said before they repeat themselves (and sometimes, I have missed it entirely, and they HAVE to repeat themselves). For me, I think my problems are two-fold. Part of is I am super-sensitive to background noise and hear that much more clearly than people's voices. Also, I think I sometimes have difficulty processing what people say. It can take a minute sometimes (which is why I say what occasionally when not REALLY needing them to repeat themselves--I just need a bit of time to process what they said into something coherent).

I actually do have voice-range hearing loss, but even when someone is talking loud enough for me to hear them, it sometimes sounds like gibberish. I use closed-captions when watching TV because I don't trust my mind enough to catch all the dialogue.

I'm beginning to wonder if I even have hearing loss. It was diagnosed when I was a kid after my parents kept calling my name when I was spacing out watching cartoons. Cue many years of hearing aid drama and general fussing over my hearing. Maybe it's all psychological now?

Then again, I can't hear rain from outside, even though my parents can. However, I recall two weeks last summer when I could hear the air conditioner and my parents couldn't. I thought it was my imagination for a while. It was at a strange frequency.

I truly don't get my ears.

One more thing to add to the list of defects I have that I never knew wasn't a thing NT's had a problem with too..

Darn this list is getting long!

It's not just us - people are always saying ''what?'' to eachother. My NT family does that all the time. My mum would say something and her sister is always saying, ''huh?'' Or when people say a name of someone they say, ''who?'' Same to everyone else, and it's not just deaf people. My family aren't deaf.

Wow, I have major problems with this...had no idea it might be AS related. I thought it was from too many rock shows.

But yeah, frequently the ambient noises are much "louder" than a person's voice (such as exhaust hoods in a commercial kitchen.)

I usually tell people to call my name and wait a moment before blurting out a bunch of stuff at me. So instead of

it's

I do the parrot-back thing quite a lot, and with people I work with, I make sure that they know that if I don't parrot-back, I probably didn't hear them.