title: Reliability of monosyllabic discrimination tests in white noise for differentiating among hearing aids.
abstract: In spite of criticism, monosyllabic discrimination tests are widely employed for hearing aid selection. The current study was designed to investigate the following questions: (1) How reliable is aided speech discrimination of monosyllables in a background of white noise? (2) Can differences among hearing aids be reliably demonstrated by measuring intelligibility of monosyllables in a background of white noise? and (3) Do hearing aids interact with hearing loss? Twenty subjects with mild-moderate sensorineural hearing losses participated in two experimental sessions. Four hearing aids were evaluated using the NU-6 monosyllables in a background of white noise (s/n = +20 dB). Since the standard deviation of the test-retest differences was 6%, differences between aids were not considered significant unless they exceeded 12%. An interaction between subjects and hearing aids was found; that is, the best aid for one person was not the best for all. Measuring monosyllabic word intelligibility in a background of white noise does not reliably identify a single best aid. However, one or more inferior aids were consistently eliminated in 80% of the subjects.
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D001309:Auditory Threshold; D003638:Deafness / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D005069:Evaluation Studies as Topic; D005260:Female; D006310:Hearing Aids; D006320:Hearing Tests; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008722:Methods; D008875:Middle Aged; D009622:Noise; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D011594:Psychometrics; D013060:Speech