Pure tone audiograms from hearing-impaired children. II. Predicting speech-hearing from the audiogram.

Pure tone audiograms and speech audiograms using sentence lists were obtained from 150 8-16-year-old children with pure tone hearing losses ranging from mild to severe. Most of the hearing impairments were cochlear in origin. Three 'speech-hearing' measures were selected from the speech audiograms, and it was shown that the correlation coefficients between two of these and the pure tone hearing thresholds were roughly in agreement with figures from previous studies of adults = 0.882 for Speech Reception Threshold and 0.533 for Discrimination Score. In addition, a correlation of 0.329 was found between the slope of the speech audiogram and pure tone thresholds. The strength of different summaries of the pure tone audiogram for predicting the various speech-hearing measures were compared. It was found that although the traditional summaries did quite well, their relative strengths varied according to the speech-hearing measure under consideration. The best summary predictors for all the speech-hearing measures were, either alone or in combination, two indices which have been proposed recently by the present authors, and which measure both the degree of pure tone hearing loss and the slope of the pure tone audiogram. However, the gains in predictive strength achieved with these indices were small.