The Stenger and Speech Stenger Tests in Functional Hearing Loss

Abstract

Chaiklin and Ventry [1965] reported a high incidence of negative or equivocal results on the Stenger and Speech Stenger tests in the identification of functional hearing loss among subjects referred to a Veterans Administration hospital for hearing evaluation. The efficiency of the Stenger tests was apparently affected by interaural sensitivity differences and by the size of the functional component in the better ear. The present study aimed at replicating, in so far as was practicable, the Chaiklin and Ventry study to see whether their findings could be duplicated in a somewhat different setting. The 35 adult subjects ranging in age from 20 to 64 years, were given a standard audiologic test battery for determination of functional or nonorganic hearing loss: pure-tone thresholds, spondee speech and electrodermal (EDR) audiometric thresholds. Procedures were designed to parallel, as closely as possible, the procedures employed in the Chaiklin and Ventry study. An overall evaluation was used as the criterion against which the contribution of each individual test was judged as to its efficiency in distinguishing the functional component. Stenger and Speech Stenger predicted hearing loss of the functional type and correlated with the criterion at beyond the 0.001 and 0.05 levels of probability. This result contrasts with the findings of Chaiklin and Ventry, and others, that these tests have yielded negative or equivocal predictive results.

Key Words:

• Efficiency of Stenger tests
• Electrodermal response (EDR)
• Battery of functional tests