The Connected Sentence Test (CST) and the Hearing In Noise Test (HINT) were administered to all subjects. An investigator in the room with the subject scored the test. The investigator was blinded to the experimental settings of the hearing aids to control for experimenter bias. The CST is a test of speech intelligibility for everyday speech presented at a fixed SNR. The test consisted of 24 pairs of speech passages produced conversationally. The subject's task was to repeat all words of each test sentence. Each passage included 25 key words that were scored correct or incorrect. Subject scores from 1 pair of passages were averaged to obtain an intelligibility score for each experimental condition. Data from Pearsons et al. indicate that real-world SNRs in relatively noisy environments range from approximately +4 dB to -1 dB. Consequently, the tests were administered at a +3 dB SNR, which represented a relatively difficult real-world listening situation. This SNR was chosen to minimize floor and ceiling effects for all subject groups based on a previous investigation in our laboratory, given the steep performance-intensity function that has been reported for the CST.