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An Evaluation of the BKB-SIN, HINT, QuickSIN, and WIN Materials on Listeners With Normal Hearing and Listeners With Hearing Loss

Rachel A. McArdle
Bay Pines VA Healthcare System, Bay Pines, FL, and University of South Florida, Tampa

Sherri L. Smith
James H. Quillen VA Medical Center and East Tennessee State University

Contact author: Richard H. Wilson, James H. Quillen VA Medical Center, Audiology (126), Mountain Home, TN 37684. E-mail: richard.wilson2{at}va.gov.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine in listeners with normal hearing and listeners with sensorineural hearing loss the within- and between-group differences obtained with 4 commonly available speech-in-noise protocols.

Method: Recognition performances by 24 listeners with normal hearing and 72 listeners with sensorineural hearing loss were compared for 4 speech-in-noise protocols that varied with respect to the amount of contextual cues conveyed in the target signal. The protocols studied included the Bamford-Kowal-Bench Speech-in-Noise Test (BKB-SIN; Etymtic Research, 2005; J. Bench, A. Kowal, & J. Bamford, 1979; P. Niquette et al., 2003), the Quick Speech-in-Noise Test (QuickSIN; M. C. Killion, P. A. Niquette, G. I. Gudmundsen, L. J. Revit, & S. Banerjee, 2004), and the Words-in-Noise test (WIN; R. H. Wilson, 2003; R. H. Wilson & C. A. Burks, 2005), each of which used multitalker babble and a modified method of constants, as well as the Hearing in Noise Test (HINT; M. Nilsson, S. Soli, & J. Sullivan, 1994), which used speech-spectrum noise and an adaptive psychophysical procedure.

Results: The 50% points for the listeners with normal hearing were in the 1- to 4-dB signal-to-babble ratio (S/B) range and for the listeners with hearing loss in the 5- to 14-dB S/B range. Separation between groups was least with the BKB-SIN and HINT (4–6 dB) and most with the QuickSIN and WIN (8–10 dB).

Conclusion: The QuickSIN and WIN materials are more sensitive measures of recognition performance in background noise than are the BKB-SIN and HINT materials.

KEY WORDS: auditory perception, hearing loss, speech perception, word recognition in multitalker babble

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