2022 NHCA Annual Virtual Conference

The speech banana is ubiquitous in the classroom and the clinic, but what nutritional value does it hold for understanding the effect of hearing loss on speech perception? The speech banana is used to illustrate the frequency of the speech sounds (phonemes) and how hearing loss may therefore result in difficulty in perception of certain sounds. However, in reality each phoneme encompasses a frequency range, not a single frequency, and therefore attempting to map hearing loss to individual phoneme perception is not as straightforward as we might think. The typical speech banana graphic provides an overly simplistic representation of the speech frequencies. Further, not all speech bananas are the same. A close examination of various speech bananas shows that some have greater nutritional value than others. This presentation will provide an overview of phoneme acoustic characteristics as well as a historical overview of the ubiquitous speech banana so that we can better understand (and interpret) the nutritional value that it holds.