Abstract
Continuous discourse material with a background of interfering (“Cafeteria”) noise was processed by eight different hearing aids fitted to KEMAR. Tape recordings of the processed signals were then presented in pairs to individual listeners, whose judgements of relative intelligibility were used to eliminate competing aids and select an eventual winner. Discrimination scores were also obtained from each listener, using speech discrimination tests processed under identical conditions. In general, for each individual, there was a high correlation between the aid selected by paired comparisons and that selected by the highest discrimination score. Thus paired comparisons appeared to be a reliable means of identifying hearing aids yielding maximal speech discrimination scores. However, some aspects of the results raised questions about the nature of intelligibility judgments and whether different types of test material or different characteristics of the background noise might lead to different hearing aid selections. The problem of selecting valid testing procedures will be discussed. [Work supported by NIH.]
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