Abstract
The capacity of listeners to yield preferences for hearing aids that provide maximally intelligible speech was evaluated by the method of paired comparisons. Discourse, spoken by a male talker with General American dialect, was processed by five hearing aids under conditions of quiet and a background of multitalker babble. Hearing-aid-processed revised CID sentences, spoken by the same male talker and embedded in the same multitalker background, were used as stimuli in establishing criterion measures of intelligibility. All stimuli were tape recorded and delivered via nonaural earphone to 90 normal listeners. The relationship between listener assessments of intelligibility for discourse and objective measurements of sentence intelligibility was evaluated by correlation analysis. Clinical implications of the results will be discussed. Findings represent preliminary evidence that measures of listener-assessed intelligibility may offer a valid, reliable, and rapid means of evaluating behavioral performance under the wide variety of electroacoustic characteristics available in a master hearing aid. [Work supported by VA.]
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