Clinic - Week 8

This week in clinic was kind of slow. Our last patient did not show up, so I decided to do a speech in noise test with the undergraduates who were there observing. We did the QuickSin speech in noise test. I had heard of this test, and only had done it once. So, it was good practice to use the CD and go through the test battery. Three different sets of sentences were used. The first group of test sentences was the regular list, with the changing signal-to-noise ratio getting harder as each sentence was presented. The second list was a high pass sentence list, in which the speakers voice changed. And the third list was a low-pass sentence list.

The student did very good at the beginning, but as the signal-to-noise ratio changed and made the test harder, some words were then missed. As the test went on and I was looking at the sentences and knew what the target words were, I still found it hard to pick out the words in the sentences. The sentences had a medium level of predictability, making it hard to guess what was coming next. While some of the sentences made sense, others did not at all.

I found this journal which talks about another speech in noise test, called the Speech in Noise (SIN). This article evaluates the list equivalency and the test-retest reliability. They gave the test to 20 normal listeners and 20 listener with a sloping SN hearing loss. There are lots of charts that make the results easy to see. It is similar to the QuickSin that I used in clinic. It provides another example of speech in noise testing that we should become familiar with. Also, check out who wrote it. Lundeen would be proud !! haha! Hope you like it :)

Bentler, R. (2000) List equivalency and test-retest reliability of the speech in noise test, American Journal of Audiology, 9, 84 - 100.

http://aja.asha.org/cgi/reprint/9/2/84?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=speech+in+noise+test&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&sortspec=relevance&resourcetype=HWCIT