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Published on: June 25, 2019
The influence of lexical-access ability and vocabulary knowledge on measures of speech recognition in noise
Marre W Kaandorp1, Annette M B De Groot2, Joost M Festen1
1a Department of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery , Section Ear & Hearing, and EMGO Institute for Health and Care Research, VU University Medical Center , Amsterdam , The Netherlands and.
Objective:
The main objective was to investigate the effect of linguistic abilities (lexical-access ability and vocabulary size) on different measures of speech-in-noise recognition in normal-hearing listeners with various levels of language proficiency.
Design:
Speech reception thresholds (SRTs) were measured for sentences in steady-state (SRTstat) and fluctuating noise (SRTfluc), and for digit-triplets in steady-state noise (DIN). Lexical-access ability was measured with a lexical-decision test and a word-naming test. Vocabulary size was also measured. For the SRT, keyword scoring and sentence scoring were compared.
Study Sample:
To introduce variation in linguistic abilities, three groups of 24 young normal-hearing listeners were included: higher-educated native, lower-educated native, and higher-educated non-native listeners.
Results:
Lexical-access ability was most accurately measured with combined results of lexical decision and word naming. Lexical-access ability explained 60% of the variance in SRT. The effect of linguistic abilities on SRTs was up to 5.6 dB for SRTstat and 8 dB for SRTfluc. Using keyword scoring reduced this effect by approximately 1.5 dB. For DIN the effect of linguistic ability was less than 1 dB.
Conclusions:
Lexical-access ability is an important predictor of SRTs in normal-hearing listeners. These results are important to consider in the interpretation of speech-in-noise scores of hearing-impaired listeners.
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