Accessibility issues, especially in developing countries, have prevented the evaluation of diverse hearing abilities beyond the pure tone audiogram in the general population. PART is a free-access automated auditory measurement tool that can address accessibility issues by providing a wide variety of auditory psychophysical measures in multiple languages on standard relatively low-cost commercial interfaces such as tablets and smart phones. Here, we show that PART can complement traditional audiological tests to better account for people’s hearing complaints. Forty-four adults between 40 and 80 years old were tested in Mexico City with a traditional clinical battery (otoacoustic emissions and pure tone audiogram) and a battery of PART-based central auditory processing and speech-on-speech competition measures. Several measures from the PART battery correlated with self-reported hearing difficulties, and the spatial release from masking task was best able to capture this variance. These preliminary data support the inclusion of a speech-on-speech masking as a complement to traditional clinical measures to better account for the hearing complaints of the public. Furthermore, we show PART-based version of this test can be implemented in a clinical setting in Mexico and produce comparable results to those obtained in developed countries like the United States of America.
Portable automated rapid testing of central auditory processing measures implemented in the app PART (https://braingamecenter.ucr.edu/games/p-a-r-t/) were adapted for Spanish-speaking populations. This adaptation included the generation of a corpus equivalent to the CRM to test a speech-on-speech masking task, in addition to frequency modulation tasks, temporal gap, temporal, spectral and spectro-temporal modulations, and pure tone detection in noise. This battery of tests was selected for its potential clinical utility and its previous validation across several settings including remote testing with participant-owned headphones, tablets or smartphones. Here, we tested 96 young adults in Mexico City (ages 18–45) with normal hearing. As expected, distributions of scores were similar to previously reported norms for the English-language version of the battery in English-speaking populations. Scores for the newly developed Spanish-language speech-on-speech masking tests were also similar to data previously reported in English-speaking populations. Furthermore, there was no significant effects of age or subjective hearing handicap (HHIA) in any of the tests. This study can be now used as a normative dataset, and the adapted battery can be used as an accsessible tool (available freely online) for valid and reliable testing of central auditory processing measures in Spanish-language populations.
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