Auditory Threshold Impairment And Everyday Speech Reception

Abstract

The effect of auditory threshold impairment on the reception, in quiet and in noise, of lists of sentences designed to represent everyday speech was investigated in war vetarans, the majority of whom had sensorineural hearing loss. It was found that reception of the sentences by the subjects could be predicted with reasonable accuracy by means of the articulation index, which proved to be a better predicted than the three-frequency average hearing level. The results indicate that everyday speech reception by listeners with impaired hearing is very largely determined by degree of threshold impairment and not by impairment of maximum speech discrimination, and that threshold impairment at frequencies above 2000 Hz has an adverse effect on speech reception in some noisy situations.

Key Words:

• Speech audiometry
• Auditory masking
• War veterans
• Articulation index (AI)
• Three-frequency average hearing level
• Maximum speech discrimination