Importance and Purpose of Speech Audiometry

Importance and Purpose of Speech Audiometry: In the Pure Tone Audiometry (PTA) test, the pure tone audiogram provides only a partial picture of the patient’s auditory status because it does not give any direct information about his ability to hear and understand speech. Speech Audiometry is used to find out how a patient hears speech involves testing him with speech stimuli.

Importance of Speech Audiometry:

Using speech audiometry, audiologists set out to answer questions regarding patient’s:
- degree of hearing loss for speech
- the levels required for their most comfortable and uncomfortable loudness levels
- their range of comfortable loudness
- their ability to recognize and discriminate the sounds of speech
Speech-language pathologists use reported findings of speech audiometric results in both therapy planning and client and family counseling.
Reliability and validity of speech stimulus is better than non speech stimulus like pure tone or warble tone. Thus speech audiometry ensure more reliability and validity.
Speech audiometry is a very quick process when compared with other Hearing tests like PTA.
PTA doesn’t talk about the communication ability of the person. Though speech audiometry checks one’s hearing sensitivity, language comprehensive capacity, communication ability.

Purpose of Speech Audiometry:

The basic purpose of Speech Audiometry test is:

To measure the patient’s ability to recognize speech stimuli
To validate the Pure Tone Audiometry (PTA) results
To compliment differential diagnosis (retro-cochlear pathology)
It is difficult to evaluate HL in population with neurological disorder (like stroke , dysarthria) or with non organic hearing loss using PTA, so in those cases speech audiometry compliments better differential diagnosis.
The purpose is also to give a reasonable estimate in planning rehabilitation, especially in Hearing Aid (HA) evaluations.
Results suggest that the 2 types of stimuli were processed differently when measured behaviorally, with Mismatch Negativity Response (MMN), or Phonetic level evaluation (P300). The better discrimination and clearer neurophysiological representation of the frequency glide is provided by speech audiometry.