[Vocal audiometry: the "phonatome" recognition test. Principle, technique, initial results]

Whereas tonal audiometry makes it possible to analyze the elementary deficits of hearing, vocal audiometry enables an overall synthetic assessment of these deficits. The vocal material usually used is composed of lists of sentences, words, logatomes or even phonemes. The authors suggest resorting to lists of phonetically balanced phonatomes or diphonemes. Among the advantages this technique offers, are the rapidity of the test, the excellent representativity of the most informative acoustic components of speech and the elimination of the extralinguistic factors of speech recognition.