Click-evoked oto-acoustic emissions in normal and hearing-impaired adults

Click-evoked oto-acoustic emissions have been recorded in 18 normal subjects and 19 hearing-impaired subjects taken from an ENT outpatient clinic. An emission could be recorded in all but 1 ear of those subjects where the psychoacoustic threshold to the click stimulus was 13 dB nHL or lower. No emission could be recorded in all subjects where this threshold was 18 dB nHL or higher. The level of stimulus required to obtain a recordable emission was found to be correlated with the psycho-acoustical threshold of the click stimuli but not to a high enough level to make this a useful measure of hearing loss.