ON THE COMBINED USE OF HEARING AID AND SPEECH-READING

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to explore to what extent those who wear hearing aid use speechreading for their communication and also relationship between speech-reading ability and the severity of hard of hearing. For this purpose the author attempted the discrimination test using 5-lists of 3-syllable words to 100 hearing-aided cases of the sensory-neural hard of hearing individuals.
The following are the five test situations employed.
1) Speech-reading alone (silent)
2) Unaided hearing alone
3) Aided hearing alone
4) Unaided combination (auditory and visual)
5) Aided combination (auditory and visual)
The results obtained are as follows :
1) 81% of the individuals under the tests showed the effectiveness of the aided combination, which was remarkable in the crses with a hearing loss of between 71 and 80 dB.
2) Among the educated in speech-reading, there were found some individuals who are not making satisfactory use of the auditory cue because of their over dependence upon the ability of speech-reading.
3) Even in the uneducated in speech-reading, the compensatory aquirement of its ability was seen, and their speech discrimination was performed preformed predominantly by the auditory cue for those with a hearing loss between 80dB and by the visual cue for those with a loss exceeding this value.
4) The speech discrimination tests described here are believed to be useful for determining the application of a hearing aid to severe cases of the sensory-neural hard of hearing individuals.