Comparison of Speech Reception Thresholds for diotic, dichotic and antiphasic headphone presentations of digits-in-noise triplets using Dantale I material

A complete and accurate diagnosis is the prerequisite of efficient treatment of any disorder. For hearing disorders, the primary diagnostic tools for characterizing the type and severity typically include a pure-tone audiogram describing the sensitivity loss across the frequency range typical for speech and one or more speech recognition tests. While there is typically a high level of correlation between the audiogram and the speech recognition tests, the speech test may reveal different characteristics of the hearing disorders. The research interest in out-of-clinic versions of speech in noise has increased in recent years. Different implementations exist in various languages, e.g. the digits-in-noise triplet test made available by the World Health Organization. The present study examines a similar triplet test featuring digits in Danish originating from the DANTALE I material. The original masking noise of the DANTALE I material did not contain sufficient high-frequency content to mask the digits effectively and equally well, so a new masking noise was derived from the digit material. Three different spatial configurations of the presented speech in noise were tested: diotic speech in dichotic noise, and antiphasic speech in both diotic and dichotic noise. Initial test on 18 subjects (5 subjects with better hearing ear pure-tone average (PTABE) > 30dB) in the age range 53-81 years (mean 64.4 years) shown reasonable correlation (r > 0.86 for all three configurations) between PTABE and the estimated speech reception thresholds.