Assessment of speech discrimination ability of hearing impaired subjects using FIR digital filter

The relationship between speech discrimination ability and the location of organic lesions was investigated for hearing impaired patients based on a newly proposed index. This index represents the degree of abnormality in the speech discrimination ability of a patient which cannot be accounted for by his damaged pure tone sensitivity. It was shown that this index is useful for predicting the source of a patient´s difficulty in speech perception, and is clinically useful for estimating the locus of lesion for patients with hearing impairments.