Objective hearing measures require linking perception, physiology, and speech ability.

Evidence

In order to develop an objective measure of hearing ability, it is necessary to establish the links between speech perception, psychophysical measures of perceptual sensitivity to the acoustic cues that underlie effective speech perception, and the proposed objective measures. This paper describes our initial investigations in this direction. The overall aim of this study was to examine the relationships between perceptual sensitivity to temporal fine-structure cues, brainstem encoding of complex harmonic and amplitude-modulated sounds, and the ability to understand speech in noise. Understanding these links will allow the development of an objective measure that could be used to detect changes in functional hearing before the onset of permanent threshold shifts. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 4157

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader work on auditory perception paradigms bridging psychophysics and neurophysiology; also relevant to the ongoing challenge of objective audiometry in infants. — connects to: A human listener is needed to connect objective sound pressure with perceived loudness — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 650
• SEED: Angle: ‘Can we detect hidden hearing loss before the audiogram budges?’ — the race to build objective functional-hearing tests that catch deficits before permanent threshold shifts.