Distant listening of speech is a common task performed daily by all human beings. In such an auditory situation, the speech signal is not only affected by the ambient noise but is also degraded during its in-air propagation between the emitter and the receptor. The present study takes a new path in speech perception in noise as it analyzes the phenomenon of intelligibility loss with increasing listener-to-speaker distance by considering the combined effect of amplitude attenuation and of a stable outdoor rural ambient noise (without wind or perceptible mechanical noise). Reference measurements and recordings were first performed during a Pilot Study in a milieu characterized by very low reverberation indexes and low acoustic pollution. These outdoor conditions of experimentation were used to build a realistic model for the design of a Laboratory Experiment aimed at observing the recognition performances of monosyllabic words for subjects with normal hearing thresholds. We simulated the outdoor amplitude attenuation due to propagation of the speech signal and masked it with the recorded interfering ambient noise. Several simulated distances of listening could be tested for each of the 36 French participants as different lists of 17 French words were played between the virtual distances of 11 to 33 m from the source (with a step of 2 meters). The played stimuli and the answers of the participants were analyzed at several levels: correct answers on words, intelligibility function, Speech Recognition Threshold (SRT) and recognition of the syllable structure. They were also observed at the level of phonemes: distribution of vowel recognition, or detailed consonant confusions and similarity judgments in function of both the distance and dB SNR levels.