The question of phonetic balance in word recognition testing.

Twenty subjects with normal hearing and 15 subjects with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing losses were tested with eight lists of words using monosyllabic pronunciation to determine word recognition scores. Four of the lists were taken from Northwestern University Test No. 6 and four were simply made up by randomly selecting words from a dictionary. All of the word lists were used to determine performance-intensity functions. No clinically meaningful differences were observed among the lists.