Development and validation of words in babble test in the modern Greek language

Abstract

Abstract Purpose: The aim of this paper is to present and describe the development and validation of new Words in the Babble test in modern Greek. Materials and Methods: Four 50-word phonemically balanced lists in babble noise were administered to 44 normal hearing subjects and 53 patients with hearing loss (HL) ears with mild and moderate sensorineural HL (SNHL). The word lists were monoaurally presented (i.e., separately for the right and left ears) at 11 signal-to-noise (babble) intensity levels, from −12 to +12 dB. The signal remained constant at 65 dB for all participants with normal hearing and at 20 dB SL for participants with SNHL, whereas the multitalker babble stimulus varied according to the desired signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Results: The results showed that word recognition scores were negatively affected by HL and were negatively related to the degree of HL. There was a statistically significant difference for all scores in all SNRs, both between participants with normal hearing and those with mild HL as well as between participants with mild and moderate HL, except for −3 dB SNR and −6 dB SNR between mild and moderate HL. In addition, there were no statistically significant differences between the right and left ears in any of the SNRs. Conclusions: The existing literature suggests that the use of monosyllabic words produces recognition performance in multitalker babble tests, as observed in languages such as Spanish, Estonian, and Arabic, whereas the present study provides evidence that a similar effect is produced when disyllabic words are used.