A method for determining hearing thresholds in the absence of pure-tone testing includes an adaptive speech recognition test which includes a calibrated item pool, each item having a difficulty value (di) and associated standard error (se). Test items are administered to a group of individuals having mild to moderately severe hearing loss to obtain responses. The responses are subjected to multiple regression statistical methods to develop an equation for converting an individual's test score to hearing threshold values at several frequencies. The adaptive speech recognition test can be administered to an individual and their score can be converted into hearing thresholds at each of the several frequencies by use of the equation.
