Development of Psychoacoustic Screening Tests for Hearing Assessments
Abstract
The evaluation of suprathreshold listening abilities in audiological assessment is often minimized despite the valuable insight it produces about auditory discrimination skills. These capabilities can be assessed from psychoacoustic tests. However, measuring these abilities requires a significant amount of time. Therefore, screening tests were developed for frequency discrimination, gap detection, and amplitude modulation tests to identify individuals for whom these skills are most likely to be useful. The purpose of this project was to determine the ability of this screening tool to predict good performers and determine who is likely to have reduced skills and require full threshold assessment. Thirty normal hearing adults were enrolled in the study. The psychoacoustic threshold and screening tests employed the same 3-alternative forced choice procedure. Threshold estimates were obtained and compared to the screening test results. Findings revealed that listeners with psychoacoustic thresholds that fell within normal limits also passed the screening test.