When you have a hearing test, your clinician produces an “audiogram”. An audiogram is a graph that depicts where you can just barely hear tones at different frequencies. If you look at the audiogram below, it shows low pitches (like bass) on the left and high pitches (like treble) on the right. The loudness goes from very quiet at the top to very loud at the bottom. The blue line shows this person’s hearing thresholds in the left ear and the red line shows this person’s hearing thresholds in the right ear. Any sounds above the line (quieter than threshold) are not audible for this individual, while sounds below the line (louder than threshold) are audible. This audiogram depicts a moderate hearing loss.

Now let’s take a look at speech sounds on the audiogram. This will allow us to understand which speech sounds are audible for a person with this hearing loss and which ones are not. In this case, sounds such as a “p”, “h”, “g”, “k”, “t”, “f”, “s” and “th” are not audible.

That means the word “pail” will sound like “ail” and the word “sat” will sound more like “a”.

How about with this hearing loss? Even though it’s only described as a “moderate to moderately-severe” hearing loss, none of the speech sounds are audible! Conversation is going to be nearly impossible.

Have you ever seen the familiar sounds audiogram before? Or the speech sounds on an audiogram? Try comparing it to your own hearing test and let me know what you learn!

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