The Cochlear Implant School Toolkit

1 - How Hearing Works

Familiar sounds audiogram

A familiar sounds audiogram, illustrated below, represents sound in terms of loudness and frequency. It also illustrates the range of phonemes in conversational speech as depicted in the lightly shaded "speech banana." Children with cochlear implants may be able to hear most of the sounds in the speech banana. However, those phonemes that are high in pitch and low in amplitude (e.g., S, F, and TH) may be difficult for them to hear.

Each sound wave that reaches the ear will differ in frequency and amplitude and begins a cascade of events that result in hearing.