Audiograms Explained

What is an audiogram?

This is a chart showing your child’s hearing test results. It shows how loud a sound has to be and at what frequency before your child can hear it. Your child may have the same level of deafness for all frequencies or have different hearing levels at different frequencies e.g. your child may have difficulty hearing higher frequency sounds.

The shaded area is also known as the speech banana and shows the range of pitch and loudness for speech sounds. Softer sounds are at the top and louder at the bottom of the graph. For example the ‘s’ sound is high in pitch and soft. The ‘l’ sound is low in pitch and louder. A child who is moderately deaf will likely have difficulty hearing speech sounds above the moderate top line e.g. ‘f’, ‘s’, ‘th’, etc.

Some sounds fall outside of the speech banana. These are known as environmental sounds. The illustrated graph below shows a speech banana and along with the pitch and frequency of some familiar sounds.

Without hearing aids:

Mild: Children who have a mild hearing loss would hear a baby crying or music, but may be unable to hear a whispered conversation or leaves rustling. The child may have difficulty hearing the soft speech sounds s,f,th,sh,p,h,g,k which may impact on their ability to clearly follow and understand certain words and conversations particularly in very noisy environments.
Moderate: Children with a moderate hearing loss would hear a dog barking or a telephone ringing but may be unable to hear a baby crying or sound from a computer speaker. All speech sounds will be challenging for the child to hear. Children may find it difficult to follow a conversation particularly when background noise is present.
Severe: Children with a severe hearing loss will benefit from powerful hearing aids. Children would hear an aeroplane or drums being played but would be unable to hear a baby crying or dog barking. Conversations will be very challenging and children will rely heavily on lip-reading even when they are using hearing aids. Group work will be a demanding task for these children. Some children with a severe hearing loss will benefit from using sign language for communication in addition to speech.
Profound: Children with a profound hearing loss may sometimes, but not always, hear a large lorry or aeroplane. Without a hearing aid, spoken communication is no longer possible even with intense effort. They will not be able to hear music or people talking. They will rely mostly on lip-reading and/or sign language for communication and find spoken conversations a challenge. They may benefit from good quality hearing aids.

Audiogram Symbols

This handy guide, to hand to parents to make audiogram information less complicated for them to understand, was created by FIRST YEARS graduate Jennifer Rakers (class of 2010). It was adapted from the FIRST YEARS reference document, "How to Read an Audiogram: Auditory Thresholds." from http://firstyears.org/lib/howtoread.htm

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