Hypothesis. This quantitative study evaluated: (1) The effect of auditory training on the perception of phonemes, words and sentence recognition in quiet and with competing babble. (2) Changes in test scores from mid to post therapy. (3) The Correlation of severity of hearing loss with improvement in post-test scores.

The sample. Fourteen subjects received auditory training and ten control group subjects received lectures on hearing loss and hearing aids and received free hearing aid batteries for one year. The 24 adult subjects had a moderate to severe binaural sensorineural hearing loss and used bilateral digital hearing aids.

The California Consonant Test (Owens & Schubert, 1968, 1977) was used to identify and to quantify perceptual phonemic errors to be used for auditory training for the experimental group and to evaluate progress in therapy for both groups. The subjects participated in sixteen, one hour, therapy sessions consisting of training discrimination to perceive words, sentences and conversational speech in quiet and in competing babble. The Northwestern University Test (Tillman & Carhart, 1966), Connected Speech Test (Cox et al., 1987, 1988) and the California Consonant Tests (Owens & Schubert, 1968, 1977) were used to evaluate the progress and out-come of therapy.

Results. An independent-samples t-test was used to compare the pre-post-test scores for each group and a paired-sample t-test was used to compare pre-post-test and mid-post treatment scores for the same individuals. The experimental group performed significantly better (p< =.0125) than the control group on all pre-post test measures. The control group had a significant difference on The Word Recognition Test in quiet. For the experimental group there was a significant difference between the mid-test and the post-test scores for the Word Recognition and Connected Speech tests. There was not a significant correlation between severity of hearing loss and the four outcome measures.

Conclusions. The reason this study supported the hypotheses that training individuals to listen critically and to utilize acoustic information to improves their understanding of speech in quiet and with background noise.