title: Relationship between consonant recognition in noise and hearing threshold.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Although poorer understanding of speech in noise by listeners who are hearing-impaired (HI) is known not to be directly related to audiometric hearing threshold, HT (f), grouping HI listeners with HT (f) is widely practiced. In this article, the relationship between consonant recognition and HT (f) is considered over a range of signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs).
  
  
  METHODS
  Confusion matrices (CMs) from 25 HI ears were generated in response to 16 consonant-vowel syllables presented at 6 different SNRs. Individual differences scaling (INDSCAL) was applied to both feature-based matrices and CMs in order to evaluate the relationship between HT (f) and consonant recognition among HI listeners.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The results showed no predictive relationship between the percent error scores (Pe) and HT (f) across SNRs. The multiple regression models showed that the HT (f) accounted for 39% of the total variance of the slopes of the Pe. Feature-based INDSCAL analysis showed consistent grouping of listeners across SNRs, but not in terms of HT (f). Systematic relationship between measures was also not defined by CM-based INDSCAL analysis across SNRs.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  HT (f) did not account for the majority of the variance (39%) in consonant recognition in noise when the complete body of the CM was considered.
authors.affiliation: House Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA, USA. yyoon@hei.org
authors.forename: Yang-soo
authors.initials: YS
authors.lastname: Yoon
authors.forename: Jont B
authors.initials: JB
authors.lastname: Allen
authors.forename: David M
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Gooler
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001301:Audiometry, Pure-Tone; D001302:Audiometry, Speech; D001309:Auditory Threshold / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006319:Hearing Loss, Sensorineural / Q000503:physiopathology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009622:Noise; D010700:Phonetics; D012044:Regression Analysis; D059629:Signal-To-Noise Ratio; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult