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Psychoacoustic Audiometry
Published in John C Watkinson, Raymond W Clarke, Christopher P Aldren, Doris-Eva Bamiou, Raymond W Clarke, Richard M Irving, Haytham Kubba, Shakeel R Saeed, Paediatrics, The Ear, Skull Base, 2018
Josephine E. Marriage, Marina Salorio-Corbetto
Figure 51.12 shows a simplified representation of the levels and frequencies of the sounds of speech and of environmental sources on the audiogram. Graphs of this type are used for counselling purposes, and the area where the speech sounds are represented is colloquially known as ‘the speech banana’. Although the perception of these sounds should not be thought of as an ‘all-or-nothing’ event, merely reliant on the audibility at a given frequency/level, it is useful to see where conversational and environmental sounds fall on the audiogram plot. It should be noted that the audiogram is mainly focused on the range of frequencies that are important to understand speech.
The Role of the Audiologist in Life Care Planning
Published in Roger O. Weed, Debra E. Berens, Life Care Planning and Case Management Handbook, 2018
William D. Mustain, Carolyn Wiles Higdon
The audiogram is a graphic representation of hearing sensitivity. It shows an individual's threshold for tones of different frequencies. Frequency, measured in hertz (Hz), is plotted along the abscissa and intensity, measured in decibels (dB), is plotted along the ordinate. Thresholds for the left ear are plotted with an X and thresholds for the right ear are plotted with a 0. Normal hearing is considered to be between –10 and +20 dB HL. Hearing level (HL) is the number of decibels relative to normal hearing, which is 0 dB HL on the audiogram. The audiogram shown in Figure 10.2 indicates normal hearing in the left ear and a hearing loss in the right ear. The area enclosed by the two wavy lines is called the speech banana. This area represents the frequencies and intensities of spoken English and assists the audiologist in explaining how a given hearing loss may affect a person's ability to understand speech. In the example audiogram, the person will not be able to hear speech sounds above 1,000 Hz in the right ear because his/her thresholds are out of the speech banana. Were this person to have this degree of hearing loss in both ears, he may be expected to have difficulty understanding high-frequency speech sounds such as s, f, th, p, t, k, sh, and ch, for example. In addition, he may be expected to have considerable difficulty understanding conversational speech in the presence of background noise, such as in a cafeteria. Figure 10.3 shows the frequency of various speech sounds, as well as the intensity of some common environmental sounds.
Satisfaction with hearing assessment feedback using the My Hearing Explained tool: client and audiologist perceptions
Published in International Journal of Audiology, 2023
Louise A. Nell, Faheema Mahomed Asmail, Karina C. De Sousa, Marien Alet Graham, De Wet Swanepoel
Several feasible initiatives to simplify assessment feedback include the Speech Banana and the Speech Intelligibility Index. These initiatives apply the principle that non-professionals will understand the audiogram when using familiar sounds or associating it to speech. The Speech Banana superimposes the audiogram depicting individual phonemes at a conversational level (Ross 2004). Ross (2004), however, has criticised this tool for its static nature, as typical conversation varies, and phonemes are not naturally perceived individually. Consonant and vowel cues increase clients’ understanding of speech compared to what the audiogram records within quiet and isolated pure tones (Ross 2004). There are efforts to make the Speech Banana accessible to tonal languages, but not all languages have been included yet (Hu, Li, and Lau 2019). A quantifiable alternative to the Speech Banana is the Speech Intelligibility Index which indicates the perception of functionally perceived speech within quiet, instead of realistic noise within daily life. The Speech Intelligibility Index has also led to the misperception of clients asking the amount of residual hearing they may have (Hornsby 2004). The issue with these derivatives is that although the audiogram is simplified, it is still complex (Klyn et al. 2021). Nevertheless, educational sheets and alternative tools may still be beneficial due to the simple language alternatives used to describe the hearing loss and relate it to its functional impact on the perception of sounds (Gilligan 2016).
Development of the Mandarin speech banana
Published in International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 2019
Xu-Jun Hu, Fang-Fang Li, Chi-Chuen Lau
The unique Mandarin speech banana has been generated in this paper. Since disparities are identified in the speech bananas between Mandarin and English, the Mandarin speech banana is considered necessary for clinical use for native Mandarin speakers. The tone in Mandarin also affects the formant graph. The speech banana is an objective tool to provide information for speech training on the potential issues due to unheard sounds or sounds with reduced audibility.