Results
As expected, the hearing-impaired listeners performed worse than the normal-hearing listeners. They required a better Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) to get 50% of the sentences correct. However, the key observation was that both listener groups were affected by the same amount of SNR when going from anechoic to reverberant test conditions. The reasons for the clinical reports are therefore thought to be that reverberation makes easy listening conditions slightly challenging for normal-hearing people; while the same acoustical change makes difficult listening conditions impossible for hearing-impaired people.
The study also compared monaural and binaural listening. Again it was found that both listener groups benefited equally from binaural listening over monaural listening.