Adaptation of the HINT (hearing in noise test) for adult Canadian Francophone populations

Abstract

The HINT provides an efficient and reliable method of assessing speech intelligibility in quiet and in noise by using an adaptive strategy to measure speech reception thresholds for sentences, thus avoiding ceiling and floor effects that plague traditional measures performed at fixed presentation levels A strong need for such a test within the Canadian Francophone population, led us to develop a French version of the HINT. Here we describe the development of this test. The Canadian French version is composed of 240-recorded sentences, equated for intelligibility, and cast into 12 phonemically balanced 20-sentence lists. Average headphone SRTs, measured with 36 adult Canadian Francophone native speakers with normal hearing, were 16.4 dBA in quiet, -3.0 dBA SNR in a 65 dBA noise front condition and -11.4 dBA SNR in a 65 dBA noise side condition. Reliability was established by means of within-subjects standard deviation of repeated SRT measurements over different lists and yielded values of 2.2 and 1.1 dB for the quiet and noise conditions, respectively.

Development of a Danish speech intelligibility test

“…This variation was depicted in Figure 4, and the figure can be compared to the corresponding figures in previous studies, e.g. Nilsson et al (1994); Vaillancourt et al (2005); Hällgren et al (2006). The list-SRT N s in these studies are distributed within the interval 91 dB, while in the present study, the SRT N s are confined to the interval 90.5 dB.…”

“…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).…”

“…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.…”

“…This equals to four 'person-presentations'. In Vaillancourt et al (2005), each sentence was tested 36 times, resulting in 144 person-presentations per sentence. In Hällgren et al (2006), the sentences were tested 32 times, resulting in 128 person-presentations per sentence.…”