Development of a quick speech-in-noise test for measuring signal-to-noise ratio loss in normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners

• Published in: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Vol. 116; no. 4; pp. 2395 - 2405
• Main Authors: KILLION, Mead C, NIQUETTE, Patricia A, GUDMUNDSEN, Gail I, REVIT, Lawrence J, BANERJEE, Shilpi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Woodbury, NY Acoustical Society of America 01-10-2004; American Institute of Physics
• Subjects: Acoustic Stimulation; Acoustics; Adolescent; Adult; Audiometry, Speech; Audition; Auditory Threshold; Biological and medical sciences; Case-Control Studies; Exact sciences and technology; Female; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Fundamental areas of phenomenology (including applications); Hearing Loss, Sensorineural - diagnosis; Hearing Loss, Sensorineural - physiopathology; Humans; Male; Middle Aged; Noise - adverse effects; Perception; Physics; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Speech Perception - physiology; Speech Reception Threshold Test - methods; Hearing; Healthy subject; Auditory disorder; Background noise; Experimental study; Signal to noise ratio; Hearing loss
• ISSN: 0001-4966; 1520-8524
• DOI: 10.1121/1.1784440

This paper describes a shortened and improved version of the Speech in Noise (SIN) Test (Etymotic Research, 1993). In the first two of four experiments, the level of a female talker relative to that of four-talker babble was adjusted sentence by sentence to produce 50% correct scores for normal-hearing subjects. In the second two experiments, those sentences-in-babble that produced either lack of equivalence or high across-subject variability in scores were discarded. These experiments produced 12 equivalent lists, each containing six sentences, with one sentence at each adjusted signal-to-noise ratio of 25, 20, 15, 10, 5, and 0 dB. Six additional lists were also made equivalent when the scores of particular pairs were averaged. The final lists comprise the "QuickSIN" test that measures the SNR a listener requires to understand 50% of key words in sentences in a background of babble. The standard deviation of single-list scores is 1.4 dB SNR for hearing-impaired subjects, based on test-retest data. A single QuickSIN list takes approximately one minute to administer and provides an estimate of SNR loss accurate to +/-2.7 dB at the 95% confidence level.