Speech Testing at Hidden Hearing

Understanding speech clearly is an important part of good hearing. Speech testing assesses how well you hear and understand spoken words.

What Is Speech Testing?

Speech testing is a key part of our comprehensive hearing assessment. Standard hearing tests measure your ability to hear different pitches and volumes, and speech tests look at how well you can recognise and interpret words and sentences.

During a speech test, your audiologist will:

• Play recorded words or sentences through headphones or speakers

• Ask you to repeat what you hear

• Sometimes present speech with background noise to mimic real-life listening situations

This helps us measure your speech recognition ability, which is essential for daily communication.

Why Is Speech Testing Important?

Hearing loss can make sounds quieter, and can affect how clearly you hear them. You could hear someone talking but struggle to understand what they’re saying, especially with a lot of background noise.

Speech testing allows us to:

• Understand the clarity of your hearing

• Determine how well you understand speech in quiet and noisy settings

• Identify distortion or reduced speech discrimination

• Fine-tune hearing aids to improve speech understanding

It gives us insight into how your hearing loss is affecting your communication and how we can help.

What Does Poor Speech Discrimination Mean?

People with mild to moderate hearing loss can experience speech distortion. This means the brain doesn’t process words the way it used to, making it hard to follow conversations, even if the speaker is loud and clear.

If speech discrimination is poor:

• Voices may sound muffled, jumbled or unclear

• You might often ask people to repeat themselves

• It can be especially difficult to understand speech in group settings or with background noise

Speech testing helps us measure this distortion and ensure any hearing solution we recommend — such as hearing aids — is tailored to your needs.

When Is Speech Testing Used?

Speech testing is commonly used for:

• People who have trouble following conversations

• Those considering hearing aids

• Monitoring changes in hearing over time

• Evaluating the benefit of current hearing aids or devices

It’s also helpful for identifying whether a hearing aid or cochlear implant may provide better outcomes, depending on your test results.

What Happens After the Test?

Once your speech testing is complete, we’ll talk you through the results and what they mean for your hearing and communication. If we find you have hearing loss, we’ll discuss a tailored solution.