title: Reliability and validity of infant speech-sound discrimination-in-noise thresholds.
abstract: Infants were tested on a speech-sound discrimination-in-noise task using the visual reinforcement infant speech discrimination (VRISD) procedure with an adaptive (up-down) threshold protocol. An adult control group was tested using the same stimuli and apparatus. The speech sounds were synthetic magnitude of ba and magnitude of ga. The masker was band-passed presented continuously at 48 dB SPL. Test-retest reliability was good for both groups, although test-retest differences were smaller for adults. For infants the mean of the absolute values of the differences between tests was only 5.2 dB, and there was less than a 10-dB difference between the two tests of 14 (87.5%) of the 16 infants completing the study. The infant-adult difference in discrimination threshold in noise was 6.9 dB, which agrees well with detection-in-noise thresholds from earlier studies and with discrimination-in-noise thresholds obtained on a subset of subjects in our earlier work. Advantages of the adaptive threshold procedure and its possible applications both in research studies and in the clinic are discussed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Otolaryngology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
authors.forename: R J
authors.initials: RJ
authors.lastname: Nozza
authors.forename: S L
authors.initials: SL
authors.lastname: Miller
authors.forename: R N
authors.initials: RN
authors.lastname: Rossman
authors.forename: L C
authors.initials: LC
authors.lastname: Bond
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D005069:Evaluation Studies as Topic; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D009622:Noise; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013069:Speech Reception Threshold Test / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods / Q000592:standards*