[Designing a new tool for hearing exploration]

Many presbycusic patients have difficulty in understanding certain words. This could be justified because certain sounds in Spanish are more difficult to perceive, particularly the sounds with energy in the high frequencies. We propose to use a sentence as a tool to check this theory.

All the Spanish sounds were analyzed, measuring the degree of acoustic energy in all the frequencies. The conclusions drawn from the comparison of the results allowed the design of the tool that is proposed here.

We established a gradient of perception difficulty, occlusive consonants being the least perceptible, followed by fricative, and finally all those segments with harmony and a clear formant structure. The Spanish sentence "Ana vio ese coche rojizo fino" is proposed as the tool for this study. This sentence has some as it comprises certain peculiarities that makes it particularly useful for this purpose. It will allow us to check whether understanding deteriorates as we move from beginning to end, helping evaluate the importance of high frequencies for intelligibility.

A positive result could help in the design of amplification systems to improve speech intelligibility. In addition, the exploratory tool could allow neuro-acoustic exploration, useful in the central auditory pathology studies.