title: Talker effects on word-discrimination scores of adults with sensorineural hearing impairment.
abstract: 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.
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006319:Hearing Loss, Sensorineural / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D013065:Speech Intelligibility; D013067:Speech Perception