Speech reception in noise by hearing‐impaired listeners

Abstract

The goal of this study was to determine the extent to which the difficulty experienced by impaired listeners in understanding noisy speech may be explained merely on the basis of elevated detection thresholds. Twenty impaired ears of 14 subjects, spanning a variety of audiometric configurations with average hearing losses to 75 dB, were tested for reception of consonants in a speech‐spectrum noise. Speech level, noise level, and frequency‐gain characteristic were varied to generate a range of listening conditions. Results for impaired listeners are compared to those of normal‐hearing listeners tested under the same conditions with extra noise added to approximate the impaired listener's thresholds. Although there are a few exceptions, the conclusion based on this sample of moderate‐to‐severe hearing loss is that, when compared to normals listening under similar conditions of threshold shift (or, more generally, similar values of articulation index), hearing‐impaired listeners exhibit little or no handicap in speech reception. [Work supported by NIH.]