Accuracy of audiometric test room simulations of three real‐world listening environments

Hearing aid benefit depends primarily on the extent to which amplification facilitates speech understanding in typical everyday listening environments. In the hearing aid fitting process, improved speech understanding is often measured in an audiometric test room. However, because audiometric test rooms are smaller, quieter, and less reverberant than typical rooms, these data may not accurately predict speech understanding in daily life. This study was undertaken to evaluate the validity of three simulated real‐world listening environments created in an audiometric test room. The three environments represented a typical living room, cocktail party, and classroom, respectively. Twenty normal‐hearing subjects, listening monaurally, provided intelligibility scores for four phonetic contrasts produced by each of three normal talkers. Intelligibility obtained in the real environment was compared with that measured in the corresponding simulated environment. Results indicated that the relative intelligibility o...