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Hearing Assessment

The first part of the testing procedure is sitting in a sound booth and listening for a variety of tones, from deep tones to high treble tones. You listen to them because most everyday environmental sounds and speech are arranged in this range of frequencies. You confirm you heard each presented tone by pressing a button on ear at a time. The professional will decrease the volume of each tone to determine where it becomes difficult to hear. This is called the hearing threshold. These are recorded on the audiogram as an x for the left ear and an o for the right ear. Each letter represents how loud a given tone needs to be in order to be heard.

The next step is to determine the speech discrimination or understanding. You will be asked to listen to single syllable words, that are phonetically balanced, such as "cat" to determine the discrimination level for each ear. This is done to determine your ability to understand speech. The next portion will be presentation of two syllable words. After two words are answered correctly the presentation level will be reduced until the patient cannot get two words correct. This will determine the threshold for recognizing speech. These tests will show how well speech is understood, the misconception is that hearing aids cure all when in fact they are designed to increase "volume" but if you hear the word "tractor" and I say "strawberries" hearing aids will not improve that. Your brain is a use it or lose it organ when it comes to speech discrimination.

Good hearing and the ability to process what we hear determine success with hearing aids. Our ears have several complex, highly delicate mechanisms that work in perfect harmony to pick up sounds and transform them into electrical signals for the brain to interpret. To understand spoken language the brain must decode the various speech signals "Vowels and Consonants". Hearing Loss raises three communication barriers. First, soft sounds become difficult to hear. Secondly, consonants such as t, sh, f, p, s and th begin to fade. You might think that because they are high pitched and spoken more softly than vowels, this would not matter. But it does; the consonants actually convey most word information.

If you were to write a word and then remove the vowels you probably would be able to still decipher it. But write the same word, now remove the consonants, you would have serious difficulty trying to make out the same word. The role of consonants is to separate syllable and words from one another, a task that takes place in the brain. If you can't hear the various sounds, they can't be passed on for deciphering and interpretation; it sounds as though other people are mumbling.

Example:

Without Vowels:
_r_ ng_ j__c_

Without Consonants:
O_a__e _ui_e

The Word is ORANGE JUICE

Please feel free to contact Iowa Hearing Aid Centers for more information at: 800.792.9564