This paper describes the results of two experiments in which speech recognition performance was determined for listeners with sensorineural hearing loss, while listening in babble. Adaptive strategies were used in both experiments to measure the signal-to-babble ratio required to achieve a preselected level of performance at several speech presentation levels encountered in normal conversation or when listening through an amplification system. The results suggest that the proposed adaptive strategy may provide a practical method by which the relative effects of competition on speech recognition may be quantified in an individual listener.