OBJECTIVES: A considerable portion of hearing-impaired patients show disproportional loss in speech intelligibility with respect to their pure tone audiogram. This study investigated the relationship between tone decay (TD) and unaided or aided word recognition scores (WRS).
✦ Clinical Takeaway ✦
Audiologists should consider adding tone decay testing to their battery for patients whose speech intelligibility is disproportionately poor relative to their pure-tone audiogram, as it may reveal retrocochlear or neural contributions not captured by threshold alone.
✦ Why It Matters ✦
If tone decay reliably predicts disproportionate speech intelligibility loss, it could improve the diagnostic precision of audiological evaluations and guide more targeted rehabilitation strategies.
✦ Key Points ✦
- 01Tone decay testing may identify hearing-impaired patients whose speech understanding is worse than their audiogram predicts.