Development of a dichotic sentence identification test for hearing-impaired adults.

Third-order synthetic sentences were aligned to make them suitable for dichotic presentation. These dichotic sentence materials were then administered to 14 normal listeners and 48 hearing-impaired subjects to determine the influence of peripheral hearing loss on test performance. Results suggest that the Dichotic Sentence Identification test is resistant to the influence of peripheral hearing loss until the pure-tone average of 500, 1000, and 2000 Hz exceeds approximately 50 dB. Beyond this level, degree of peripheral hearing loss limits its value for detecting central auditory disorder. Data are also provided on six persons with either confirmed or suspected lesions involving retrocochlear structures.