Development and Validation of the Spanish AzBio Sentence Corpus

Abstract

Objective: To create and validate a Spanish sentence test for evaluation of speech understanding of Spanish-speaking listeners with hearing loss or cochlear implants (CI). Study Design: Two thousand sentences were recorded from two male and two female speakers. The average intelligibility of each sentence was estimated as the mean score achieved by five listeners presented with a five-channel cochlear implant simulation. The mean scores of each sentence were used to construct 42 lists of 20 sentences with similar mean scores. List equivalency was then validated by presenting all lists to 10 CI users and in a 2-list comparison in a clinical setting to 38 CI patients. Setting: Tertiary referral center. Patients: Normal-hearing listeners (n = 5), CI users in a research study (n = 10), and CI patients (n = 38) in routine clinical follow-up. Intervention: Multiple sentence lists from a newly minted speech perception test. Main Outcome Measures: List intelligibility and equivalence across sentence lists. Results: Forty-two lists of sentences were equivalent when all lists were presented in random order to 10 adult CI recipients. The variability of scores observed on lists presented to the same listener in the same condition was captured using a binomial distribution model based on a 40-item list for 38 adult implant recipients. Conclusion: The Spanish AzBio Sentence Test includes 42 lists of 20 sentences. These sentences are roughly equivalent in terms of overall difficulty and confidence limits have been provided to assess the significance of variability in list scores observed within or across conditions. These materials will be of benefit when assessing native Spanish speakers in both research and clinical settings.

Development and Validation of a Mandarin Chinese Adaptation of AzBio Sentence Test (CMnBio)

“…The authors contended that there were 40 independent linguistic units per list for the English AzBio sentences ( Spahr et al, 2012 ). Similar results were reported for the Spanish AzBio sentences ( Rivas et al, 2021 ). We took the same approach as in Spahr et al (2012) and Rivas et al (2021) and plotted the SD obtained from the 30 CI participants over the reference range constructed with an item number of 40 based on binomial distribution.…”

“…Similar results were reported for the Spanish AzBio sentences ( Rivas et al, 2021 ). We took the same approach as in Spahr et al (2012) and Rivas et al (2021) and plotted the SD obtained from the 30 CI participants over the reference range constructed with an item number of 40 based on binomial distribution. The results are shown in Figure 6 (left panel).…”

“…Our 17 normal-hearing listeners scored 78.0% correct using the 5-channel noise vocoder CI simulation. Using a similar 5-channel vocoder CI simulations, the normal-hearing listeners scored 85.2% correct with the English AzBio sentences ( Spahr et al, 2012 ), 85.0% correct with the Spanish AzBio sentences ( Rivas et al, 2021 ), and 82.0% correct with the Hebrew AzBio sentences ( Taitelbaum-Swead et al, 2022 ), respectively. In a previous study, we compared recognition of the English AzBio and CMnBio sentences under various vocoder conditions.…”

“…Fifteen of the 29 lists that produced the most similar performance were selected to form the commercially available AzBio Sentence Test, and the next eight lists with the most similar performance scores were included in the Minimum Speech Test Battery for adult CI users ( MSTB, 2011 ). Since the advent of the English AzBio sentences, similar sentences were developed and validated in several other languages including French ( Bergeron et al, 2019 ), Spanish ( Rivas et al, 2021 ), and Hebrew ( Taitelbaum-Swead et al., 2022 ).…”

The Effect of Age, Type of Noise, and Cochlear Implants on Adaptive Sentence-in-Noise Task

“…The sentences are designed to be meaningful, but not expected (for example, “Your hair was colored green”), that are spoken by multiple talkers. Accordingly, they provide a good estimation of performance in daily listening conditions (English [ 29 ]; Hebrew [ 30 ]; French [ 31 ]; Spanish [ 32 ]).…”