Reliability, sensitivity and validity of magnitude estimation, category scaling and paired-comparison judgements of speech intelligibility by older listeners.
This study investigated the reliability, sensitivity, and validity of speech intelligibility judgments for hearing aid evaluation. Subjects aged 60-87 years judged the intelligibility of sentences using either magnitude estimation, category scaling or paired comparisons. The 60+ age group was chosen as representative of the majority of hearing aid wearers. Speech recognition scores for Central Institute for the Deaf (CID) sentences and Northwestern University Auditory Test No. 6 (NU-6) words were also obtained. The speech was bandpass filtered using filter settings that produce a monotonic increase in predicted intelligibility based on articulation index theory. Speech recognition scores and intelligibility judgments were obtained for each of eight filter conditions. Test-retest reliability was poorest for paired comparisons and CID sentence scores. There were no differences in sensitivity among the three psychophysical procedures. Intelligibility judgments and NU-6 scores were more sensitive than CID sentence scores to differences among conditions. The results indicated that intelligibility judgments are valid measures of speech recognition.
Purdy
S C
SC
University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Pavlovic
C V
CV
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000368:Aged; D000669:Amplifiers, Electronic; D005260:Female; D006309:Hearing / Q000502:physiology*; D006310:Hearing Aids; D006320:Hearing Tests; D006801:Humans; D008144:Loudness Perception; D008297:Male; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013065:Speech Intelligibility / Q000502:physiology*; D013067:Speech Perception