Development of the Everyday Conversational Sentences in Noise test

To capture the demands of real-world listening, laboratory-based speech-in-noise tasks must better reflect the types of speech and environments listeners encounter in everyday life. This article reports the development of original sentence materials that were produced spontaneously with varying vocal efforts. These sentences were extracted from conversations between a talker pair (female/male) communicating in different realistic acoustic environments to elicit normal, raised and loud vocal efforts. In total, 384 sentences were extracted to provide four equivalent lists of 16 sentences at the three efforts for the two talkers. The sentences were presented to 32 young, normally hearing participants in stationary noise at five signal-to-noise ratios from -8 to 0 dB in 2 dB steps. Psychometric functions were fitted for each sentence, revealing an average 50% speech reception threshold (SRT₅₀) of -5.2 dB, and an average slope of 17.2%/dB. Sentences were then level-normalised to adjust their individual SRT₅₀ to the mean (-5.2 dB). The sentences may be combined with realistic background noise to provide an assessment method that better captures the perceptual demands of everyday communication.