Speech Audiometry

Abstract

About 40 years ago the Acoustical Society of America was founded and the first number of its journal was published in October 1929. In looking through its first volume it is a sobering experience to find that, by that time, practically all we know about the essentials of speech testing was completed although it was not until during the Second World War that articulation testing had a new stimulus in its application to the supra-threshold testing of the speech interpreting potentials of deaf patients: this became known as speech audiometry. Speech audiometry had previously been introduced as a crude form of threshold detectability in the 1930's and was known as a screening test for sifting out children whose hearing was sub-normal from an ordinary school population and it was in regular use by many educational authorities until about 1950. As a quick method of testing large groups of 20 or more at a time it served a very useful purpose but it was gradually realised that it was inferior to pure tone screening insofar as it failed to detect cases of slight high frequency deafness.