Consonant confusions in patients with sensorineural hearing loss.

Consonant confusion matrices were obtained from 22 outpatient listeners with sensorineural hearing loss for four sets of CV and VC nonsense syllables, presented monaurally at SRT + 40 DB. Testing was typically conducted for six hours on each of two separate days. Overall performance and patterns of confusions were stable over time. Analysis of the matrices in terms of phonological features indicated that the patterns of consonant confusions varied both with degree and configuration of the subject's loss. Scaling of intersubject similarity using a pairwise multidimensional scaling analysis resulted in consistent classification of subjects according to audiometric configuration into three groups-essentially normal hearing, flat or rising audiograms, and high-frequency hearing losses.