Comparison of three types of French speech-in-noise tests: A multi-center study

Abstract

Objective: To compare results on the everyday sentence test ‘FIST’, the new closed-set sentence test ‘FrMatrix’, and the digit triplet screening test ‘FrDigit3’. Design: First, the FrMatrix was developed and normative values were obtained. Subsequently, speech reception thresholds (SRTs) for the three types of tests were gathered at four study centers representing different geographic regions in Belgium and France. Study sample: Fifty-seven normal-hearing listeners took part in the normative study of the FrMatrix, and 118 subjects, with a wide range of hearing thresholds, participated in the comparative study. Results: Homogenizing the individual words of the FrMatrix with regard to their intelligibility resulted in a reference SRT of −6.0 (±0.6) dB SNR and slope at the SRT of 14.0 %/dB. The within-subject variability was only 0.4 dB. Comparison of the three tests showed high correlations between the SRTs mutually (>0.81). The FrMatrix had the highest discriminative power, both in stationary and in fluctuating noise. For all three tests, differences across the participating study centers were small and not significant. Conclusions: The FIST, the FrMatrix, and the FrDigit3 provide similar results and reliably evaluate speech recognition performance in noise both in normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners.

Key Words::

• Speech recognition in noise
• French speech tests
• everyday sentences
• matrix sentences
• digit triplets
• discriminative power

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Marian Saels, Sarah Vinck, and Kyra Visser for their help in gathering the optimization and evaluation results of the FrMatrix. Caroline Diercxsens and Alice Lamy are gratefully acknowledged for administering the measurements in Brussels and Toulouse, and we thank Patrick Verheyden, Evelien Bienstman, Dominique Dehaze, and Olivier Vales for recruiting the subjects. Finally, we wish to thank Daniel Berg and Melanie Zokoll for their technical and methodological support. Part of this work was supported by a grant from the European Union FP6, Project No. 004171 HEARCOM.

Declaration of interest: All authors confirm that they have no conflicts of interest to declare.