Auditory temporal acuity of the hearing impaired and its relationship to speech intelligibility.

Auditory temporal acuity (deltat) was measured in 42 hearing-impaired subjects to investigate the hypothesis that it would facilitate the production of intelligible speech. The measure divided the test population into two subgroups with mean speech intelligibility measures of 77.7 and 52.6%, respectively. These results are discussed along with implications relating to hearing loss and the slope of audiogram.