Effect of response criterion on measures of speech understanding in the elderly.

Twenty-four elderly subjects were divided into three groups on the basis of response criterion in a signal-detection task. The groups, representing strict, lax, and intermediate listeners, were then compared on the basis of performance on several conventional speech audiometric measures. When the data were corrected for degree of hearing loss, group differences were not significant. Thus, conventional speech audiometric results did not appear to be significantly influenced by response criterion.