Development of an Australian behavioural method for assessing listening task difficulty at high speech...

To develop and validate an Australian version of a behavioural test for assessing listening task difficulty at high speech intelligibility levels.

In the SWIR-Aus test, listeners perform two tasks: identify the last word of each of seven sentences in a list and recall the identified words after each list. First, the test material was developed by creating seven-sentence lists with similar final-word features. Then, for the validation, participant's performance on the SWIR-Aus test was compared when a binary mask noise reduction algorithm was on and off.

All participants in this study had normal hearing thresholds. Nine participants (23.8-56.0 years) participated in the characterisation of the speech material. Another thirteen participants (18.4-59.1 years) participated in a pilot test to determine the SNR to use at the validation stage. Finally, twenty-four new participants (20.0-56.9 years) participated in the validation of the test.

The results of the validation of the test showed that recall and identification scores were significantly better when the binary mask noise reduction algorithm was on compared to off.

The SWIR-Aus test was developed using Australian speech material and can be used for assessing task difficulty at high speech intelligibility levels.