Preliminary Evaluation of a Novel Language Independent Speech-in-Noise Test for Adult Hearing Screening

This article presents a preliminary evaluation of a novel language independent Speech-in-Noise test for adult screening in terms of Speech Reception Threshold (SRT) estimates and prediction of hearing sensitivity. The test is based on multiple-choice recognition of meaningless Vowel-Consonant-Vowel words and was administered to 26 normal hearing young adults and 58 unscreened adults who also underwent pure-tone audiometry. Receiver operating characteristics were built using the World Health Organization criteria for “slight/mild” and “moderate” hearing loss as gold standards and SRTs as test outcome. Both curves showed very good test performance in predicting success/failure in pure-tone audiometry (area under the curve: 0.79 for “slight/mild” and 0.83 for “moderate” hearing loss). A complete generalized linear model including SRT, age, and their interaction showed that the SRT and the interaction between SRT and age were significant predictors of pure-tone audiometry outcomes, whereas age alone was not a significant predictor of the degree of hearing loss. Moreover, preliminary results from test-retest data showed that the test was reliable in repeated measures (Spearman’s rank-order correlation coefficient = 0.72; Cohen’s kappa = 0.83 for “slight/mild” and 0.64 for “moderate” hearing loss). Further research is needed to fully assess test performance in a larger sample of participants, also including subjects with higher degrees of hearing loss (e.g. “severe” and “profound”)