PREDICTING SPEECH RECOGNITION THRESHOLDS FROM PURE-TONE HEARING THRESHOLDS

Hearing sensitivity is most commonly still reported in terms of pure t one thresholds. Unfortunately, simple procedures for predicting Speech Recognition Thresholds from Pure Tone Thresholds are not currently av ailable. To remedy this problem, pure tone thresholds were collected f rom 802 individuals over the range of 250 to 8000 Hz. Five subsets of pure tone thresholds which are commonly used to report hearing status were then considered. An average correlation of 0.878 was found betwee n the various pure tone indexes and the speech recognition threshold. Using regressions between pure tone and the speech measure, a table wa s constructed that allows conversion of the various pure tone indexes to a predicted speech recognition threshold and involves only a very s imple computation.