THE RELATION between a free voice acuity test and a pure tone audiogram is a complex one of many factors; no final statement has yet been made by which the interpretation of either can be made in terms of the other or by which both can be reduced to a common denominator. Some laboratories depend exclusively on a pure tone audiogram as a measure of how well a man can hear speech, while others look askance on the pure tone test and claim that only a test using speech sounds is valid as a measure of speech reception.
An early discussion of the relation between speech reception and audiometry is that of Fletcher,1 who compared a free voice test and audiometry through the speech range (512 to 2048 cycles per second). Fletcher concluded, from the rather close correspondence of hearing loss, that the free voice and the pure tone audiogram