The audiogram measures only sound detection, not other auditory perceptions

Evidence

The audiogram is an historical assessment tool, developed in the early 1900s, originally used because we had limited knowledge of the ear, and we did not have access to technology that could easily generate and manipulate complex sounds in real time for audiological assessment. The recent century has repeatedly demonstrated that the audiogram does not reflect our multiple auditory perceptual abilities. The audiogram is critically important for addressing site of lesion (whether a hearing loss is conductive, in the outer or middle ear, or sensorineural) and is also widely used to guide hearing aid fitting. However, this text will illustrate that the variability in perceptual deficits experienced by listeners with sensorineural hearing loss is quite high and that the audiogram does not provide a measurement of any other level of auditory perception besides detection. — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 36

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what specific perceptual deficits vary most widely among listeners with matching audiograms?
• XREF: Links with the general critique that single summary metrics (like the book’s other assessment tools) flatten multidimensional phenomena.

Related

• The audiogram measures only detection and conceals varied sensorineural perceptual deficits. (similarity 0.97)
• The audiogram fails as a robust indicator of perceptual deafness deficits (similarity 0.92)
• The audiogram only captures detection thresholds and fails to predict real-world speech perception (similarity 0.89)
• Perceptual deficits correlate poorly with audiogram thresholds and vary widely (similarity 0.89)
• The audiogram measures only detection thresholds, so it misses everyday speech-in-noise ability. (similarity 0.87)
• The audiogram only measures sound detection, omitting everything else about auditory perception. (similarity 0.87)
• The audiogram is a behavioral test rooted in a century of psychoacoustics (similarity 0.85)
• Standard audiological tests miss most of the perceptual abilities humans need to communicate (similarity 0.85)
• Successful communication requires multiple distinct auditory perception abilities beyond simple detection. (similarity 0.85)
• The audiogram does not predict pitch perception deficits in hearing loss (similarity 0.85)
• Listeners with hearing loss form a heterogeneous perceptual group, not a single category (similarity 0.85)
• The audiogram cannot predict which hearing-impaired listeners have temporal processing deficits (similarity 0.84)
• Audiograms and frequency selectivity fail to predict pitch perception deficits (similarity 0.84)
• Sensorineural hearing loss disrupts some temporal abilities but not others, with wide individual variability (similarity 0.83)
• The audiogram normalizes hearing data so deviations from typical are visually obvious (similarity 0.83)