Development of the Farsi Hearing in Noise Test

Abstract

Objectives: Develop sentences in Farsi for use in the Hearing In Noise Test (HINT); equalise the difficulty of the sentences; form twelve 20-sentence lists; and determine the reliability and norms for these materials.

Design: The same study design as used in the development of HINT in other languages was followed. Sentences were sampled from elementary school reading materials. Sentence difficulty was matched by scaling sentence levels. Equivalent sentence lists were formed. Speech reception thresholds were measured under headphones in quiet and in three noise conditions that differed in the spatial locations of the speech and noise sources. Spatial locations were simulated using head-related transfer functions.

Study sample: Subjects were 24 adult native speakers of Farsi with pure-tone thresholds ≤25 dB HL at audiometric frequencies from 0.25 to 8.00 kHz.

Results: Reliability, the variability of test–retest score differences, was 1.28 dB in quiet and 1.08 dB in noise. Average speech reception thresholds in Quiet = 19.4 dB(A). Average signal/noise ratios at threshold were Noise Front = −5.4 dB, Noise Right = −13.7 dB, and Noise Left = −13.7.

Conclusions: The reliability and norms for the Farsi HINT are comparable to those for other languages, enabling comparison of test results across languages.

Keywords:

• Hearing in Noise Test
• HINT
• Farsi
• Persian
• normative data

Note

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge Navid Shahnaz for his assistance in evaluating the Farsi sentences and for the use of his laboratory to make the recordings. We also gratefully acknowledge Rahim Ghanbari for his volunteer efforts as the talker for the recordings of the Farsi sentences. The authors also want to thank Robab Teymouri for her constructive advice in revising the paper. We also thank Reza Bahari Kia for providing the required instruments.

Disclosure statement

None of the co-authors report conflicts of interest.

Notes

1 These additional languages include New Zealand English, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Polish, European Portuguese, Russian and Latin American Spanish.

Additional information

Funding

Researchers donated their time and effort. Laboratory facilities in the Department of Hearing and Speech Science, University of British Columbia used to make the recordings were also donated. This study was also supported by AVA Rehabilitation Centre.