Normally hearing people have much lower speech reception thresholds (SRTs) in a background of a single talker than in the background of speech‐shaped noise, whereas hearing‐impaired people do not. The hearing impaired appear to be less able than normal to take advantage of temporal and spectral ‘‘dips’’ in interfering speech. SRTs were measured in background sounds that varied to the extent that they contained such dips. The subjects tested were: (a) young with normal hearing; (b) elderly with near‐normal hearing; (c) young with moderate to severe cochlear hearing loss and (d) elderly with moderate to severe cochlear hearing loss. In a background that contained both spectral and temporal dips, the hearing‐impaired and elderly with near‐normal hearing performed much more poorly than normals. The signal‐to‐background ratio required for 50% intelligibility was about 19 dB higher for elderly hearing impaired than for young normals. Young hearing‐impaired subjects showed a slightly smaller deficit, but still a substantial one. Linear amplification combined with appropriate frequency‐response shaping (NAL amplification) only partially compensated for these deficits. It is proposed that noise with spectral and temporal dips provides a potentially useful way of evaluating the effects of signal processing such as frequency‐selective amplification and compression.