For the audiological assessment of the speech-in-noise abilities of children with normal or impaired hearing, appropriate test materials are required. However, in Denmark, no standardized materials exist. The purpose of this study was to develop a Danish sentence corpus suitable for testing school-age children. Based on the 600 validated test sentences from the Danish DAT ( Dagmar, Asta, or Tine) corpus, 11 test lists comprising 20 sentences each were carefully constructed. These lists were evaluated in terms of their perceptual similarity and reliability with a group of 20 typically developing, normal-hearing children aged 6 to 12 years. Using stationary speech-shaped noise and diotic stimulus presentation, speech recognition thresholds (SRTs) were measured twice per list and participant at two separate visits. The analyses showed that six test lists were perceptually equivalent. These lists are characterized by a grand average SRT of −2.6 dB signal-to-noise ratio, a test–retest improvement of 0.6 dB, and a within-subject standard deviation of 1.1 dB signal-to-noise ratio. The other lists were characterized by slightly higher SRTs, slightly larger training effects, and slightly larger measurement uncertainty, but were otherwise also usable. Overall, it is therefore concluded that the developed corpus is suited for assessing speech recognition in noise in Danish 6- to 12-year olds. The corpus is publicly available.

No abstract

Using the Danish ‘børneDAT’ corpus, the current study aimed to (1) collect normative masked speech recognition data for 6–13-year-olds in conditions with and without interaural difference cues, (2) evaluate the test–retest reliability of these measurements, and (3) compare two widely used measures of binaural/spatial benefit in terms of the obtained scores. Seventy-four children and 17 young adults with normal hearing participated. Using headphone presentation, speech recognition thresholds (SRTs) were measured twice at two separate visits in four conditions. In the first two conditions, børneDAT sentences were presented in diotic stationary speech-shaped noise, with the sentences either interaurally in-phase (‘N0S0’) or interaurally out-of-phase (‘N0S180’). In the other two conditions, børneDAT sentences were simulated to come from 0° azimuth and two running speech maskers from either 0° azimuth (‘co-located’) or ±90° azimuth (‘spatially separated’). In relative terms, the children achieved lower SRTs in stationary noise than in competing speech, whereas the adults showed the opposite pattern. 12–13-year-old children achieved adult-like performance in all but the co-located condition. Younger children showed generally immature speech recognition abilities. Test–retest reliability was highest for the SRTs in stationary noise and lowest for the spatial benefit scores. Mean benefit was comparable for the two measures and participant groups, and the two sets of scores were not correlated with each other. Developmental effects were most pronounced in the conditions with interaural difference cues. In conclusion, reference data for the børneDAT corpus obtained under different acoustic conditions are available that can guide future research and potential clinical applications.