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

Best, Virginia; Keidser, Gitte; Buchholz, Jörg M.; Freeston, Katrina

doi:10.3109/14992027.2015.1055835

Cited by 28 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…So, even if listeners are not perfectly focused at the onset of a question or answer, it might be that this is often not critical to performance. This is consistent with another recent study (Best, Keidser, Freeston, et al., 2016) in which listeners were presented with either a monologue (at a single location) or conversations involving two or three talkers (at different locations). In that study, there was no effect of increasing the spatial dynamics on the ability of listeners to follow along and answer content-related questions.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 94%

“…For longer passages, this testing format introduces a significant memory requirement, which may not be the aspect of the communication process of greatest interest to the tester if the primary goal is to assess natural listening abilities. One way to minimize the influence of memory load is to use short-duration passages (e.g., up to 1 min; Kei et al., 2003; Kei & Smyth, 1997) or to query the listener during the stimulus instead of at the end of the presentation (e.g., Best, Keidser, Buchholz, & Freeston, 2016; Best, Keidser, Freeston, & Buchholz, 2016; Hafter, Xia, & Kalluri, 2013). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Flexible Question-and-Answer Task for Measuring Speech Understanding

et al. 2016

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This report introduces a new speech task based on simple questions and answers. The task differs from a traditional sentence recall task in that it involves an element of comprehension and can be implemented in an ongoing fashion. It also contains two target items (the question and the answer) that may be associated with different voices and locations to create dynamic listening scenarios. A set of 227 questions was created, covering six broad categories (days of the week, months of the year, numbers, colors, opposites, and sizes). All questions and their one-word answers were spoken by 11 female and 11 male talkers. In this study, listeners were presented with question-answer pairs and asked to indicate whether the answer was true or false. Responses were given as simple button or key presses, which are quick to make and easy to score. Two preliminary experiments are presented that illustrate different ways of implementing the basic task. In the first experiment, question-answer pairs were presented in speech-shaped noise, and performance was compared across subjects, question categories, and time, to examine the different sources of variability. In the second experiment, sequences of question-answer pairs were presented amidst competing conversations in an ongoing, spatially dynamic listening scenario. Overall, the question-and-answer task appears to be feasible and could be implemented flexibly in a number of different ways.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 94%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Flexible Question-and-Answer Task for Measuring Speech Understanding

et al. 2016

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“…The treatment of participants was approved by the Australian Hearing Ethics Committee and conformed in all respects to the Australian government's National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research. Note that a subset of these listeners also participated in another study described in a companion paper (Best et al, 2014) and some of the data presented here (for the standard environment) also appear in that paper.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 95%

An examination of speech reception thresholds measured in a simulated reverberant cafeteria environment

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Keidser

Buchholz

et al. 2015

International Journal of Audiology

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Objective There is increasing demand in the hearing research community for the creation of laboratory environments that better simulate challenging real-world listening environments. The hope is that the use of such environments for testing will lead to more meaningful assessments of listening ability, and better predictions about the performance of hearing devices. Here we present one approach for simulating a complex acoustic environment in the laboratory, and investigate the effect of transplanting a speech test into such an environment. Design Speech reception thresholds were measured in a simulated reverberant cafeteria, and in a more typical anechoic laboratory environment containing background speech babble. Study Sample The participants were 46 listeners varying in age and hearing levels, including 25 hearing-aid wearers who were tested with and without their hearing aids. Results Reliable SRTs were obtained in the complex environment, but led to different estimates of performance and hearing aid benefit from those measured in the standard environment. Conclusions The findings provide a starting point for future efforts to increase the real-world relevance of laboratory-based speech tests.

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“…In a previous report (Best et al, 2016), we described the development of a laboratory-based speech comprehension test in which monologues spoken by a single male talker were presented in a background of speech babble. The test required listeners to process the speech in an ongoing way, comprehend its meaning, and formulate "on-the-go" answers to simple questions relating to the content.…”

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confidence: 99%