The NTID speech recognition test: NSRT^®

Abstract

Objective: The purpose of this study was to collect and analyse data necessary for expansion of the NSRT item pool and to evaluate the NSRT adaptive testing software. Design: Participants were administered pure-tone and speech recognition tests including W-22 and QuickSIN, as well as a set of 323 new NSRT items and NSRT adaptive tests in quiet and background noise. Performance on the adaptive tests was compared to pure-tone thresholds and performance on other speech recognition measures. The 323 new items were subjected to Rasch scaling analysis. Study sample: Seventy adults with mild to moderately severe hearing loss participated in this study. Their mean age was 62.4 years (sd = 20.8). Results: The 323 new NSRT items fit very well with the original item bank, enabling the item pool to be more than doubled in size. Data indicate high reliability coefficients for the NSRT and moderate correlations with pure-tone thresholds (PTA and HFPTA) and other speech recognition measures (W-22, QuickSIN, and SRT). Conclusion: The adaptive NSRT is an efficient and effective measure of speech recognition, providing valid and reliable information concerning respondents’ speech perception abilities.

Key Words::

• Speech recognition
• adaptive testing
• item response theory
• Rasch analysis

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Gina Richards, Don Sims, Kayla Holstad, and Kaleigh Richardson for their assistance in data collection, and three anonymous reviewers and Dr. Lisa Mendel for their helpful comments and suggestions. A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Audiology in 2012: Doherty K., Bochner J., Garrison W., Richards G., Holstad K. et al. 2012. An adaptive test for the clinical measurement of speech recognition. Poster presented at Audiology NOW!, Boston, USA, March 30, 2012.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no declarations of interest. However, in the interest of transparency, we wish to disclose that NSRT is a registered trademark of Rochester Institute of Technology.