A Danish Sentence Corpus for Assessing Speech Recognition in Noise in School-Age Children

Abstract

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.

Masked Speech Recognition by Normal-Hearing 6–13-Year-Olds in Conditions With and Without Interaural Difference Cues

“…Also, for the N0S0 condition a mean SRT of −2.7 dB SNR was obtained. Overall, these results are in very good agreement with those of Koiek et al (2020) and speak for good reproducibility of these measurements. For the two benefit measures, on the other hand, reliability was lower, especially for the spatial benefit scores ( σ w = 1.5–1.9 dB).…”

“…Recently, a Danish sentence corpus for pediatric speech audiometry applications was developed ( Koiek et al, 2020 ). Called ‘børneDAT’, this corpus is based on the validated sentence materials from the Danish DAT corpus ( Nielsen et al, 2014 ).…”