Proposal for implementing the Sentence Recognition Index in individuals with hearing disorders

Area of Science:

• Audiology
• Speech-Language Pathology
• Linguistics

Background:

• Assessing speech recognition is crucial for understanding hearing disorders.
• Existing methods may not fully capture nuanced speech recognition abilities.
• The Lists of Phrases in Portuguese (LPP) test is a tool for speech perception evaluation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce a novel strategy and protocol for calculating Sentence Recognition Indexes (SRI).
• To incorporate word importance (functional vs. content) into SRI calculations using the LPP test.
• To compare the efficacy of the new strategy against previous methods.

Main Methods:

• Words in sentences were classified as functional or content, assigning points (2 and 1, respectively).
• Sentence Recognition Indexes (SRI) were calculated for 33 normal-hearing adults using both old and new strategies.
• Results from both strategies were statistically compared.

Main Results:

• A new protocol for SRI calculation was established.
• The new strategy yielded significantly higher median SRI values across all LPP lists compared to the traditional method.
• For example, List 1B showed an increase from 60% to 82.57% with the new strategy.

Conclusions:

• The developed strategy and protocol for SRI evaluation using the LPP test are effective.
• Considering individual words provides a more detailed and less variable assessment of speech recognition.
• The new method is applicable and suitable for assessing SRI in individuals with hearing impairments.