Development of the Hearing In Noise Test (HINT) in Spanish

Abstract

Assessment of functional hearing ability is relevant to clinical outcome assessments, occupational health evaluations, and forensic applications. Communication with spoken language is a primary aspect of functional hearing ability. Comparable speech tests in multiple languages are required to make these assessments in a multilingual population. This presentation will report on an ongoing international research project to develop a Latin American Spanish version of the Hearing In Noise Test (HINT) for this purpose. The methods of selecting speech materials, recording the materials, synthesizing appropriate masking noise, equating the difficulty of the materials, forming sentence lists, norming the lists, and determining reliability and sensitivity will be discussed. Samples of Spanish, as well as other languages (English, Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Canadian French) will be used to demonstrate the procedures by which standard dialects of each language were selected. Cross-language comparisons of the spectral and temporal characteristics of the speech materials will be presented. Norms, reliability coefficients, and measurement errors for each language will also be reported. Methods for comparing and/or equating functional hearing ability across languages will be described. Finally, procedures for measuring functional hearing ability will be discussed.