Central auditory processing assessment: a French-speaking battery

Based on the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) Consensus Statement on central auditory processing and models for their exploration, a battery of audiological tests (Bilan Auditif Central--BAC) has been designed in French. The BAC consists of four types of psycho-acoustic tests: a speech-in-noise test, a dichotic test, a temporal processing test and a binaural interaction test. We briefly describe the rationale of these tests. The BAC is available in digital format. Descriptive statistics were computed on data obtained from 668 subjects divided into 15 age-groups ranging from 5 to 85 years old or over. All subjects had no complaints regarding hearing loss, normal tonal audiometry, and normal intelligence. Tests scores of the speech-in-noise test, the dichotic test and the binaural interaction test showed a normal distribution. Test scores of the temporal processing test did not follow a normal distribution. Effects of maturation and involution were clearly visible for all tests. The low correlation between scores obtained from the four tests pointed to the need for a battery of several tests to assess central auditory processing. We claim that the reported scores represent standard norms for the normal French-speaking population, and believe that the tests will be useful for evaluation of central auditory processing.