A method for measuring the intelligibility of uninterrupted, continuous speech.

Speech-in-noise tests commonly use short, discrete sentences as representative samples of everyday speech. These tests cannot, however, fully represent the added demands of understanding ongoing, linguistically complex speech. Using a new monitoring method to measure the intelligibility of continuous speech and a standard trial-by-trial, speech-in-noise test the effects of target duration and linguistic complexity were examined. For a group of older hearing-impaired listeners, significantly higher speech reception thresholds were found for continuous, complex speech targets than for syntactically simple sentences. The results highlight the need to sample speech intelligibility in a variety of everyday speech-in-noise scenarios.