Clinical measurements of speech reception threshold in noise

New lists of spoken sentences, edited in a computer, word by word, were tested clinically together with a noise, spectrally shaped as the speech. The purpose was to investigate the reliability and the learning effect of the speech reception threshold in noise, and also to assess the relations of this threshold to conventional audiometric measures. The threshold values ranged from -7 to +7 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the 97 ears investigated. Reliability, expressed as standard deviation for repeated measurements, deteriorated from 0.7 to 1.1 dB as the threshold deteriorated. Learning effect between the first and the second threshold increased from 0 to 1 dB as the threshold deteriorated. No conventional audiometric test showed a high correlation to this threshold measure. The discrimination of the sentences without noise as well as the self-rated speech recognition in noise were also investigated.