The HINT provides an efficient and reliable method of assessing speech intelligibility in quiet and in noise by using an adaptive strategy to measure speech reception thresholds for sentences, thus avoiding ceiling and floor effects that plague traditional measures performed at fixed presentation levels A strong need for such a test within the Canadian Francophone population, led us to develop a French version of the HINT. Here we describe the development of this test. The Canadian French version is composed of 240-recorded sentences, equated for intelligibility, and cast into 12 phonemically balanced 20-sentence lists. Average headphone SRTs, measured with 36 adult Canadian Francophone native speakers with normal hearing, were 16.4 dBA in quiet, -3.0 dBA SNR in a 65 dBA noise front condition and -11.4 dBA SNR in a 65 dBA noise side condition. Reliability was established by means of within-subjects standard deviation of repeated SRT measurements over different lists and yielded values of 2.2 and 1.1 dB for the quiet and noise conditions, respectively.

Correction factors can be used to predict performance on the HINT in a group of normal-hearing children in all HINT conditions, apart from quiet. Findings of the current study concur with the literature on age effects in auditory processing abilities, where performance on a variety of auditory tasks has been demonstrated to increase with age to reach adult-like values in adolescence or past 10 yrs.

Effective communication is a crucial requirement in many workplaces to ensure safe and effective operations. Often, critical verbal communications are carried out in noise, which can be very challenging, particularly for individuals with hearing loss. Diagnostic measures of hearing, such as the audiogram, are not adequate to make accurate predictions of speech intelligibility in real-world environments for specific workers, and thus are not generally suitable as a basis for making employment decisions. Instead, the Hearing in Noise Test (HINT) has been identified and validated for use in predicting speech intelligibility in a wide range of communication environments. The approach to validation of the HINT takes into account the expected voice level of the talker, the communication distance between the talker and the listener, and a statistical model of speech intelligibility in real-world occupational noises. For each hearing-critical task, a HINT screening threshold score is derived upon specification of the minimum level of performance required of the workers. The HINT is available in several languages, so the tools developed are applicable in a wide range of settings, including multilingual workplaces.

The findings indicate that level-dependent hearing protection circuitry can provide substantial benefits in speech recognition performance in noise, compared to conventional passive protection, for individuals covering a wide range of hearing losses.

Combined with previous findings, results indicate that the use of hearing aids can considerably affect F/B localization abilities in a number of individuals. Moreover, speech understanding in noise and sound localization abilities were poorly predicted from pure-tone thresholds, demonstrating the need to specifically test these abilities, both unaided and aided, when assessing AFFD. Finally, further work is needed to develop empirically based hearing criteria for the RCMP and identify best practices in hearing aid fittings for optimal functional hearing abilities.