Can an observer rate the accuracy of his message reception? Apparently, yes. Listeners were presented with spondee words against a white noise background. For each word presented, the listener recorded his received message. Immediately thereafter, he assigned a confidence rating with respect to his accuracy of message reception. We find that the assignment of confidence ratings does not interfere with the accuracy of message reception. More important, the relative accuracy of message reception is directly related to the confidence rating. This relationship is relatively invariant over a range of speech-to-noise ratios. It may be noted that the rating procedure directly yields the entire trading relation between correct confirmations and false alarms—the receiver operating characteristic (ROC). The form of the ROC curves obtained by the rating procedure is independent of average word difficulty and is similar to that obtained by successive experiments with fixed acceptance criteria.