Cross-sectional study of differences in speech understanding between users and nonusers of estrogen replacement therapy.

The purpose of this study was to examine whether women who use estrogen replacement therapy (ERT) differ from women not using ERT on several measures of speech understanding. Participants (n = 38, 60 to 74 years) completed a battery of tests including pure-tone audiometry, the Dichotic Sentence Identification (DSI) test, a test of auditory-only and auditory-visual sentence recognition, and a measure of speech understanding in reverberation. In general, women who used ERT were better able to understand distorted speech than were nonusers of ERT.