Psychoacoustic measures of hearing impairment

Several laboratories have used psychophysical methods to study various aspects of hearing impairment in the belief that rigorous stimulus and response control would lead to stable and revealing results. Unfortunately, the data obtained thus far in our laboratory are disappointing. In spite of efforts to obtain homogeneous groups of subjects (using audiometric profiles), to practice them thoroughly, and to conduct rigorous, well‐controlled research, the results of most of our experiments have been just as variable as the previous work. We feel this is probably due to the failure of standard audiometric measures to classify hearing‐impaired listeners in terms of their basic auditory abilities. Current work in our laboratory is directed at developing alternative means for classifying hearing‐impaired listeners, based on cluster analysis of performance on a large number of psychoacoustic tests. [Work supported by NIH Grant No. NS12045 and NS07108.]