Equivalency of CID and revised CID sentence lists

The equivalency of speech intelligibility scores obtained with the 10 individual lists within each of the Central Institute for the Deaf (CID) and the Revised CID (R CID) Sentence Lists was investigated. The effect of the modification procedures used to form the revised lists was analyzed. Sixty normal hearing subjects were divided into two groups of 30 each, with one group listening to all CID lists and the second group listening to all R CID lists. Sentence lists were distorted using lowpass frequency distortion at 420 Hz and scored according to the number of key words correctly identified. Employing a ± 10% precision testing criterion, all correlations computed for the lists studied were too low to render the lists equivalent for most purposes. These results relate to the reliability of test scores generated by a specific acoustic event and do not question the appropriateness of sentences as a speech intelligibility message. The mean scores for eight R CID Sentence Lists were significantly lower than scores obtained for the corresponding CID lists, suggesting that the revised lists are more sensitive to low pass frequency distortion.