Performance of older normal-hearing listeners on the tracking of noise tolerance (TNT) test
Francis Kuk1, Christopher Slugocki1, Petri Korhonen1
1WSA Office of Research in Clinical Amplification (ORCA-USA), IL, USA.
Objective:
To gather preliminary reference data on older normal-hearing (NH) adults for the refined Tracking of Noise Tolerance (TNT) test.
Design:
Within-subject repeated measures. Participants were tested on the TNT in the sound-field and under headphones. In the sound-field, speech stimuli were presented at 75 dB SPL and 82 dB SPL from 0° with a speech-shaped noise presented either from 0° or 180° at a level controlled by the participants. The order of signal level, mode of presentation, noise azimuth, and TNT passages were counterbalanced across listeners. Testing was repeated for one condition after 1-3 weeks to estimate within-session and between-session reliability.
Study Sample:
Twenty-five NH listeners (51-82 yrs of age).
Results:
Mean TNT scores (TNTAve) were about 4 dB at a speech input of 75 dB SPL and 3 dB at 82 dB SPL. The TNTAve was similar between the headphone and sound-field presentations in the co-located noise. TNTAve scores measured with noise-back were about 1 dB better than those measured from the front. The 95% confidence intervals of absolute test-retest differences were about 1.2 dB within-session and 2.0 dB between sessions.
Conclusions:
The refined TNT may be a reliable tool to measure noise acceptance and subjective speech intelligibility.
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