Understanding Word Discrimination Scores (WD) & Hearing Tests

A Word Discrimination score, also known as WD, is a measurement of a person's ability to correctly understand words spoken at a specific volume. The volume is known as MCL, which stands for most comfortable level. Word Discrimination tests are often given as a part of testing a person's hearing with or without hearing aids. A person's score reflects the percentage of words that he hears and repeats correctly.

Things You'll Need

• Pen
• Paper
• Calculator

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Instructions

• 1

  Record a person's responses when repeating 25 or 50 words from a phonetically balanced word list. This is a list of words that contains all of the vowels and consonants that occur in the English language. An audiologist can give you an example of one of these lists.

• 2

  Mark how many words the person correctly repeats out of the list.

• 3

  Divide the total of correctly repeated words by the total number of words in the list. For instance, if 50 words are spoken and the individual gets 40 right, divide 40 by 50 to get 0.8.

• 4

  Multiply your answer from step three by 100 to achieve the Word Discrimination score as expressed by a percentage. In this example, you would multiply 0.8 times 100 to get a Word Discrimination score of 80 percent