To develop a simple, inexpensive technique to quantify speech comprehension of pupils (aged 7 to 13) in special schools for the deaf, the verbal responses to pictures by 111 pupils were judged for intelligibility by untrained listeners. Pupils were asked to identify 30 pictures; their taped replies were judged by listeners who wrote down what they thought they heard. The recording phase gave a measure of spoken vocabulary (SV) while the playback phase yielded a score for number of words correctly understood by the judges (UV). The ratio UV/SV gave a measure of speech comprehensibility (SC). Analysis of the data revealed that vocabulary and speech intelligibility increased with number of years in school (UV, p .001; SV and SC, p .005). Rank orders of speech quality were positively correlated with scales UV and SC; a moderate correlation existed between scales UV and SC and amount of residual hearing. The investigators concluded that judgment of speech intelligibility could be done reliably by untrained listeners, that quantity of speech production had little connection with speech comprehension within each grade, that results were similar for both understood vocabulary and speech comprehensibility, and that the magnitude of residual hearing is a poor predictor of both vocabulary and speech comprehension. (JB)