What Will a Hearing Test Show?

Most individuals aren’t proactive about their hearing health and most likely haven’t had a hearing screening since grade school because it’s usually not part of a routine adult physical. Luckily, a professional hearing specialist can uncover a wealth of information from a hearing examination which can be used to both identify any hearing loss and help assess whether using treatments like hearing aids is effective.

A full audiometry test is more involved than what you probably recall from childhood, and you won’t get a lollipop or a sticker when it’s done, but you’ll gain a much clearer understanding of your hearing. Here are three of the most common kinds of hearing tests and what they’ll reveal.

Pure tone testing

One component that we use to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is measured in decibels (dB). Tone, what we conversationally refer to as pitch, is another key factor. At the lower end of the pitch spectrum, a low bass sound measures between 50 and 60 Hertz (Hertz, or Hz for short, is the unit of measurement related to tone or pitch), with average speech ranging between 500 and 3,000 Hz. 20 to 20,000 Hz is the range of frequencies that a healthy human ear can hear.

With a pure tone hearing test, your hearing specialist will have you don a pair of headphones which are connected to an audiometer. You may also use a device called a bone oscillator which seems scary but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. Pure tones are delivered to one ear at a time, and you signal (by pushing a button or raising a hand) when you hear a sound.

We’ll track the lowest volume required for you to hear each sound. In other words, this test gauges how well your ears are working: What range of sound you have problems hearing (which can be a key indicator of whether you’d benefit from hearing aids), and whether you are suffering from hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.

Speech audiometry

This kind of test measures your ability to accurately hear speech, again with sounds being played through headphones. Your hearing specialist will sometimes have you repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background noise. Your hearing specialist will, in other circumstances, have you repeat words they are saying, but their mouths will be hidden from view.

Because you are unable to see the speaker’s lips, you won’t get any visual cues to help you, and because they are only speaking single words, you won’t have any context to fall back on. For people who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, rhyming words, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are hard to differentiate.

Speech audiometry tracks your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing unlike tone testing which calculates how loud particular sounds have to be in order to be heard. Word recognition testing can also aid in assessing whether hearing aids might help.

Immittance audiometry

This kind of testing normally won’t cause pain, but it might be a bit uncomfortable. Tympanometry artificially alters the pressure inside of your ear by pushing air in with a small inserted probe. A graph readout will permit your hearing specialist to determine if there’s a problem with your eardrum such as earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is functioning.

Your ears have reflexes that are checked by a similar probe. When you hear a loud sound, muscles in your middle ear involuntarily contract. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to identify the extent of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise necessary to trigger this reflex. There’s no reflex response in individuals who have profound hearing loss.

Though immittance tests are most helpful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, issues with the eardrum and/or small bones inside the ear, because these can occur at the same time as age- or noise-related hearing loss, it’s essential to include to know everything that’s happening with your ears.

If you’re having difficulty hearing, give us a call and schedule a hearing test! We can help you better understand your hearing health, inform you on what you can do to preserve healthy hearing, and let you know what your treatment options are if you have hearing loss or tinnitus.