Northwestern University Auditory Test No. 6 in multi-talker babble: a preliminary report

The purpose of this project was to develop a spoken word-recognition task that could be used clinically to evaluate recognition performance of individuals with hearing loss in a background noise. The test instrument incorporated monosyllabic words at seven levels over a 35-dB range presented in a background of "multi-talker" babble that was fixed in level. In Experiment 1, we established normative data on 24 young adult listeners with normal hearing and on 50 older adult listeners with high-frequency hearing loss. In Experiment 2, we examined the effects that age and hearing loss have on understanding speech in multi-talker babble by studying 15 subjects in each decade interval from 20 to 79 years.