title: Adaptation of the HINT (hearing in noise test) for adult Canadian Francophone populations.
abstract: The HINT provides an efficient and reliable method of assessing speech intelligibility in quiet and in noise by using an adaptive strategy to measure speech reception thresholds for sentences, thus avoiding ceiling and floor effects that plague traditional measures performed at fixed presentation levels A strong need for such a test within the Canadian Francophone population, led us to develop a French version of the HINT. Here we describe the development of this test. The Canadian French version is composed of 240-recorded sentences, equated for intelligibility, and cast into 12 phonemically balanced 20-sentence lists. Average headphone SRTs, measured with 36 adult Canadian Francophone native speakers with normal hearing, were 16.4 dBA in quiet, -3.0 dBA SNR in a 65 dBA noise front condition and -11.4 dBA SNR in a 65 dBA noise side condition. Reliability was established by means of within-subjects standard deviation of repeated SRT measurements over different lists and yielded values of 2.2 and 1.1 dB for the quiet and noise conditions, respectively.
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Health Sciences, Room 1117, Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology Program, University of Ottawa, 451 Smyth Rd., Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K 1H 8M5. vaillancourt@mail.health.uottawa.ca
authors.forename: Véronique
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Vaillancourt
authors.forename: Chantal
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Laroche
authors.forename: Chantal
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Mayer
authors.forename: Cynthia
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Basque
authors.forename: Madeleine
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Nali
authors.forename: Alice
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Eriks-Brophy
authors.forename: Sigfrid D
authors.initials: SD
authors.lastname: Soli
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Giguère
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D002170:Canada; D005260:Female; D006320:Hearing Tests; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009622:Noise / Q000009:adverse effects*; D010700:Phonetics; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013065:Speech Intelligibility; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D013069:Speech Reception Threshold Test