How do I know what to expect given my hearing loss?
The ability to understand spoken speech is of primary importance. The following are guidelines that can be used to determine reasonable benefits from assistive devices (amplified telephones, TV listening devices, personal amplifiers or hearing aids). It should be remembered that these are just guidelines and a person with poor discrimination may, in fact, find great benefit through amplification as they moved from the teens to the 40-50% group.
People with low discrimination scores in independent ears may find a vast improvement in understanding if both ears are used. Therefore people with low discrimination scores may want to look into ALD's that can provide sound to both ears instead of only one. An example of this would be the telephone which is generally used with only one ear. Some of our telephones have an audio out jack that headsets, dual earbuds or a neckloop can be plugged into to provide sound to both ears. Also a speakerphone may be a good option for a person who should be using both ears on the phone. If in doubt, please email Jay or Louise or you may call us during our normal operating hours. We will be glad to answer questions or suggest equipment to meet your special needs.
Interpreting the speech discrimination score is often problematic. Goetzinger proposed a guide to evaluating the adequacy of speech discrimination ability.
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90-100% Normal Discrimination
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76-88% Slight Difficulty
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62-74% Moderate difficulty
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50-60% Poor discrimination, great difficulty
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Below 50% Very poor discrimination; listener is probably unable to understand speech at normal conversation levels
Goetzinger (1972)
What to expect from Unaided Speech Scores
Unaided speech discrimination scores provide one indicator of successful use of amplification. Berger and Millin (1971) have indicated the following expectations when using the W-22 word list.
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90% plus - suggests probable good results with amplification
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70-90% - suggests mild difficulty
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50-70% - suggests substantial difficulty
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50% or lower - suggests the probability that amplification will not be entirely successful