Listener-assessed intelligibility of hearing aid-processed speech

The capacity of listeners to yield reliable and valid preferences for hearing aid-processed speech was evaluated by the method of paired comparisons. Discourse by a male talker with General American dialect was processed by five hearing aids under conditions of quiet and a background of multitalker babble. Hearing aid-processed Revised Central Institute for the Deaf Sentences spoken by the same male talker and embedded in the same multitalker background were used as stimuli in establishing criterion intelligibility performance. All stimuli were tape-recorded and delivered via monaural earphone to 90 normal listeners. Test-retest results revealed reliability coefficients of 0.94 and 0.65 on the paired-comparison condition in quiet and in babble, respectively. A low-positive relationship was observed between responses on the two subjective tasks. Essentially negligible correlations were found between subjective preferences on these individual conditions and performance on the sentence task. General conditions are hypothesized under which paired-comparison judgments of intelligibility might be expected to correspond favorably with objective performance.