Development of a Danish test material for assessing speech-in-noise reception in school-age children
Abstract
For the audiological assessment of the speech-in-noise abilities of children with normal or impaired hearing, an appropriate test material is required. However, there is no standardized speech material for children in Denmark. The purpose of the current study was to develop a Danish sentence material suitable for school-age children. Based on the 600 test sentences from the Danish DAT corpus (Nielsen et al., 2014), 11 test lists comprising 20 sentences each were carefully compiled. These lists were evaluated in terms of their perceptual similarity and reliability with a group of 20 typically-developing normal-hearing children aged 6-12 yrs. Using stationary speech-shaped noise and diotic stimulus presentation, speech reception 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 −2.5 dB SNR, a test-retest improvement of 0.4 dB, and a within-subject standard deviation of 1.1 dB SNR. The remaining test lists produced slightly higher SRTs but were generally also usable. Altogether, it is concluded that the developed test material is suited for assessing speech-in-noise reception in Danish school-age children.
References
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