Effects of reverberation and noise on speech recognition by adults with various amounts of sensorineural hearing impairment.

Speech recognition was assessed under three levels of room reverberation, each in quiet and noise, for subjects with varying amounts of sensorineural hearing impairment. The three acoustic environments were: sound suite, reverberant room with a reverberation time (T) = 0.54 s and reverberant room with T = 1.55 s. Three groups of subjects were utilized: normal hearing, mild sensorineural hearing impairment and moderate-to-severe sensorineural hearing impairment. Speech recognition ability for each of the three groups of subjects significantly differed from the other two groups for each of the three reverberant conditions. The detrimental influences of noise and reverberation increased with the magnitude of hearing impairment. In addition, there was an interaction between noise and room reverberation, where the detrimental effects of room reverberation were compounded by the addition of noise.