Speech reception thresholds for digits

Of every 10 Canadians, 4 do not speak English as a first language. With non-native speakers of English, SRT testing using spondaic words lists, after the fashion in the U.S.A., may be difficult or invalid. This study examined the viability of using a closed set of English digits (1, 2, 4, 5, 9) for SRT testing in a Canadian setting. Ss were 130 consecutive patients referred for audiologic assessment in an English hospital in Montreal. Approximately 1/3 were native English, 1/3 native French, and 1/3 with other ethnic languages. Digit SRTs by a 10-db-down and 5-db-up procedure correlated very highly with both the standard 3-frequency (.5, 1, 2 kc/s) pure-tone average HTL (r = .94) and the Fletcher average of the 2 best speech-frequency pure-tone HTLs (r = .96). This study concluded that serial digits are viable SRT testing material for Canadian speech audiometry and should be studied for application to other multilingual populations.