Development and preliminary evaluation of a new test of ongoing speech comprehension

Abstract

Objective: The overall goal of this work is to create new speech perception tests that more closely resemble real world communication and offer an alternative or complement to the commonly used sentence recall test. Design: We describe the development of a new ongoing speech comprehension test based on short everyday passages and on-the-go questions. We also describe the results of an experiment conducted to compare the psychometric properties of this test to those of a sentence test. Study sample: Both tests were completed by a group of listeners that included normal hearers as well as hearing-impaired listeners who participated with and without their hearing aids. Results: Overall, the psychometric properties of the two tests were similar, and thresholds were significantly correlated. However, there was some evidence of age/cognitive effects in the comprehension test that were not revealed by the sentence test. Conclusions: This new comprehension test promises to be useful for the larger goal of creating laboratory tests that combine realistic acoustic environments with realistic communication tasks. Further efforts will be required to assess whether the test can ultimately improve predictions of real-world outcomes.

Key Words::

• Speech comprehension
• realistic
• hearing loss
• hearing aids

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the financial support of the HEARing CRC, established and supported under the Cooperative Research Centres Program, an Australian Government initiative. Virginia Best was also partially supported by NIH/NIDCD grant DC04545. We are grateful to Margot McLelland, Chris Orinos, and Harvey Dillon for their help at various stages of this study. Portions of this work were presented at the International Hearing Aid Research Conference (August 2012), the International Congress on Acoustics (June 2013), the International Conference on Cognitive Hearing Science for Communication (June 2013), and the XXXII World Congress of Audiology (May 2014).

Declaration of interest: The authors declare no conflicts of interest.