Do Children Require More High-Frequency Audibility than Adults with Similar Hearing Losses?

Speech cannot be understood if it cannot be heard. Therefore, audibility is undoubtedly a major goal of amplification for children and adults with hearing loss. In restoring audibility, it is often assumed that the listener can extract speech cues over the entire range of speech frequencies. This assumption is true for a person with mild to moderate hearing losses, but is not true when hearing loss is severe at the high frequencies. In addressing whether severely hearing-impaired children require more high-frequency audibility than adults with similar hearing losses, we will firstly examine how audibility affects judgments of speech intelligibility and measured speech intelligibility for severely hearingimpaired adults and children. Secondly, we will attempt to identify the factors that affect the usefulness of audibility for speech intelligibility. Finally, we will discuss the implications of the relationship between audibility and speech intelligibility for prescribing gain-frequency response for adults and children.