Talker effects on word-discrimination scores of adults with sensorineural hearing impairment

Speech discrimination testing was completed on 30 adults with varying degrees of sensorineural hearing impairment. Tape recordings of four talkers' utterances of CID W-22 word lists served as the stimulus materials. Listeners' responses were scored independently by three experienced judges. For 26 of the 30 subjects, the difference between the lowest and highest word-discrimination score was 8% or greater. Variations in scores could not be attributed to a single talker but were spread across all talkers. A moderate negative correlation was found between each listener's average word-discrimination score and amount of variability among his or her individual scores. The statistical analysis indicated that talker differences were responsible for only a small portion of the variability in scores and suggested that a factor of greater importance is the talker-listener interaction.