J Am Acad Audiol
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The most common complaint of adults with hearing loss is understanding speech in noise. One class of masker that may be particularly useful in the assessment of speech-in-noise abilities is interrupted noise. Interrupted noise usually is a continuous noise that has been multiplied by a square wave that produces alternating intervals of noise and silence. Wilson and Carhart found that spondaic word thresholds for listeners with normal hearing were 28 dB lower in an interrupted noise than in a continuous noise, whereas listeners with hearing loss experienced only an 11 dB difference. ⋯ The current data indicate that interrupted noise does provide a better differentiation both between listeners with normal hearing and listeners with hearing loss and among listeners with hearing loss than is provided by continuous noise.