The AB-York crescent of sound: An apparatus for assessing spatial-listening skills in children and adults

Abstract

Modern health services need efficient tools for measuring outcomes from interventions, that is, tools of proven efficacy which make minimal demands on the time of clinicians in learning to administer tests and in interpreting results. This paper describes an apparatus designed to meet those requirements. The apparatus administers performance tests of spatial listening for children and adults with unilateral and bilateral cochlear implants. The apparatus was designed with guidance from clinicians. It possesses three key attributes: it is simple to use; the results of tests are scored automatically and are compared with reference data; the apparatus generates comprehensive personalized reports for individual participants that can be included in clinical notes. This paper describes the apparatus and reports results of a test measuring spatial release from masking of speech which illustrates the compatibility between the new apparatus and an older apparatus with which the reference data were gathered.

Test-retest reliability of the Toy Discrimination Test with a masker of noise or babble in children with hearing impairment

“…Nine participants were tested at the University of York in a single-walled booth (Industrial Acoustics Company) located inside a sound-shielded room. Both booths contained an AB-York Crescent of Sound (Kitterick et al, 2011), which is a semi-circular array of nine loudspeakers and seven video screens. The present study used only one loudspeaker (Plus XS.2, Canton), which was mounted at a height of 1.1 m. Participants sat in a child ' s chair 1.45 m in front of the loudspeaker.…”

Candidacy criteria for paediatric bilateral cochlear implantation in the United Kingdom

“…A 'Crescent of Sound' testing apparatus (Kitterick et al, 2011) was used to present the stimuli and collect and score responses. Participants responded by selecting a picture on a touchscreen positioned in front of them.…”

Validation of the U-STARR with the AB-York Crescent of Sound, a New Instrument to Evaluate Speech Intelligibility in Noise and Spatial Hearing Skills

“…The audiovisual stands were positioned in a crescent shape with a radius of 1.45 m and extended to a height of 1.1 m ( fig. 1 ) [Kitterick et al, 2011]. The original AB-York test setup contains English sentences.…”

“…In this test, sentences are presented in noise, and the number of key words correctly repeated per sentence is scored instead of whole sentences correctly repeated [Joffo et al, 2010;Kitterick et al, 2011;Boyle et al, 2013]. This seems more suitable for CI patients than the original, difficult Plomp test.…”

“…In collaboration with Advanced Bionics, Prof. Q. Summerfield's research group in York developed a new test setup that enables the presentation of the STARR sentences in noise -at roving levels and from different directions [Kitterick et al, 2011].…”