A Swedish version of the Hearing In Noise Test (HINT) for measurement of speech recognition

Abstract

A Swedish Hearing In Noise Test (HINT), consisting of everyday sentences to be used in an adaptive procedure to estimate the speech recognition thresholds in noise and quiet, has been developed. The material consists of 250 sentences, with a length of five to nine syllables, normalized for naturalness, difficulty and reliability. The sentences were recorded with a female speaker. From the sentences, 25 phonemically balanced lists were created. All lists fluctuate less than 1 dB of the overall mean. The standard deviation of the test-retest difference is 0.94 dB when testing with one list, and decreases to 0.68 dB and 0.56 dB for two and three lists, respectively. The average speech recognition thresholds in noise for the Swedish sentences were -3.0 dB signal/noise ratio (SD=1.1 dB). The present study has resulted in a well-defined and internationally comparable set of sentences, which can be used in Swedish audiological rehabilitation and research to measure speech recognition in noise and quiet.

Development of a Danish speech intelligibility test

“…The standard deviation of the SRT N across all lists and listeners is also similar for the different tests. The standard deviation amounts to 1.0 dB for the present test, 1.1 dB for the Canadian-French (Vaillancourt et al, 2005), 1.1 dB for the Swedish (Hällgren et al, 2006), and 1.7 dB for the Cantonese version (Wong & Soli, 2005). These standard deviations are dominated by the standard deviations within listeners, but are also influenced by the variation between the list-SRT N s (means across listeners).…”

“…The standard deviation (squares) has a minimum for sentences 4 and 5, but varies very little as a function of the sentence position. The result that sentence 4 is closer to the reference level than several of the following sentences was also found in the studies of Nilsson et al (1994) and Hällgren et al (2006). As a result, it was decided here to include the last eight levels (4 to 11) in the SRT N calculation.…”

“…Nevertheless, the overall SRT N of several HINTs falls within a narrow range: (2.9 dB for the American-English HINT (Nilsson et al, 1994), (3.3 dB for the Canadian-French HINT (Vaillancourt et al, 2005), (3.0 dB for the Swedish HINT (Hällgren et al, 2006), and (3.9 dB for the Cantonese HINT (Wong & Soli, 2005). The present test has an overall SRT N of (3.15 dB.…”

“…Vaillancourt et al, 2005;Hällgren et al, 2006). These lists must be of equal difficulty to ensure stable SRT N assessments.…”

“…Therefore, a two-step process has been employed in the equalization of sentence intelligibility in several sentence tests (e.g. Plomp Hällgren et al, 2006). In this process, the first step is to determine the intelligibility of all sentences that are candidates for the test.…”