A comparison of hearing thresholds for pure tones and narrow speech bands

Abstract

The phrase “ah ah clap clap clap clap,” spoken by a female, was filtered into five narrow speech bands with a high‐frequency and low‐frequency cutoff for each band—250 Hz (125–375 Hz), 500 Hz (250–750 Hz), 1000 Hz (750–1250 Hz), 2000 Hz (1500–2500 Hz), and 4000 Hz (3000–5000 Hz). The frequency range of the bands was varied in order to maintain equal energy levels for each of the five filtered speech bands. Thresholds for pure tones (250, 500, 1000, 2000, and 4000 Hz) and the speech bands were obtained on easy‐to‐test hearing‐impaired teenagers. Their pure‐tone and speechband audiograms were remarkably similar at each test frequency. Speech‐band audiograms were subsequently obtained for many hard‐to‐test, low‐functioning children and adults for whom audiograms could not be obtained using conventional pure‐tone audiometric procedures. The effectiveness of using speech bands to determine hearing thresholds may be that speech is a more meaningful auditory stimulus than pure tones for this population.