Test of Spanish sentences to measure speech intelligibility in noise conditions

• Published in: Behavior research methods Vol. 43; no. 2; pp. 459 - 467
• Main Authors: Cervera, Teresa, González-Alvarez, Julio
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer-Verlag 01.06.2011; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Adult; Attention; Audiology; Behavioral Science and Psychology; Cognitive Psychology; English language; European Continental Ancestry Group; Female; Hearing loss; Humans; Linguistics; Male; Noise; Psychology; Spanish language; Speech; Speech Intelligibility; Speech Perception; Speech Reception Threshold Test - methods; Masking noise; Intelligibility; Speech perception; Auditory perception
• ISSN: 1554-3528; 1554-351X; 1554-3528
• DOI: 10.3758/s13428-011-0063-2

This article describes the development of a test for measuring the intelligibility of speech in noise for the Spanish language, similar to the test developed by Kalikow, Stevens, and Elliot ( Journal of the Acoustical Society of America , 5 , 1337–1360, 1977 ) for the English language. The test consists of six forms, each comprising 25 high-predictability (HP) sentences and 25 low-predictability (LP) sentences. The sentences were used in a perceptual task to assess their intelligibility in babble noise across three different signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions in a sample of 474 normal-hearing listeners. The results showed that the listeners obtained higher scores of intelligibility for HP sentences than for LP sentences, and the scores were lower for the higher SNRs, as was expected. The final six forms were equivalent in intelligibility and phonetic content.