Ability of hearing-impaired listeners to understand connected discourse

Thirty-three hearing-impaired listeners estimated the intelligibility of connected discourse presented in quiet and in the presence of noise. Speech-understanding scores were compared to routine audiometric measures and the effects of both signal-to-noise ratio and level of amplification upon speech understanding were investigated. The listeners were able to estimate the intelligibility of connected discourse reliably. Measures of auditory sensitivity were correlated highly with percentage of understanding only when connected discourse was presented at a low level and a favorable signal-to-noise ratio. The relationship of routine measures and speech understanding was low. A method for obtaining estimates of the intelligibility of running speech is presented along with the results for a typical audiology clinic population.