Reliability of the Modified Rhyme Test for Hearing

Abstract

The reliability and intercorrelations of selected lists from the clinical version of the Modified Rhyme Test (MRT) were examined using normal-hearing young listeners and older listeners believed to have incurred noise-induced hearing loss. Stability of means and variances was generally acceptable for the lists of the MRT, but the reliability coefficients and intercorrelations were generally low. In its present state, the clinical MRT appears to lack the precision to discriminate among normal young listeners, if normal young listeners really do differ in speech discrimination ability with a closed response set. We do not yet have adequate knowledge of the range of expected normal performance for the MRT. The MRT appears far more reliable when used with a much more heterogeneous hearing loss population.