Digits recognition in noise in school-aged population: effect of age, gender and number of spoken languages

Objective - To evaluate the effect of age, gender and the number of spoken languages on the speech recognition in noise performance measured with the French version of the Canadian Digit Triplet Test.

Background - The importance of evaluating speech perception in noise within regular audiological evaluations of adult and children populations has been advocated for some years. Audiologists report the scarcity of valid speech in noise tests for not including this type of measures in their regular evaluation routine. A Canadian English and French version of the Digit Triplet Test (CDTT) has been developed by the University of Ottawa and Toronto (Ellaham et al. 2016, Canadian Acoustics 44(3), 220-221) in an attempt to fill this gap. The test uses an adaptive procedure to find the speech recognition threshold defined as the signal-to-noise ratio at which 50% of digit triplets are correctly identified.

Methods – The speech recognition threshold of 48 normal hearing French speaking children was measured with the CDTT. Two lists of 24 digit triplets (e.g., 5-2-8) were presented in a 65-dBA masking noise. The listeners were asked to enter the digits heard on a keypad.

Results – Between groups comparisons will be presented, as well as the effect of gender and number of spoken language.

Conclusions - The CDTT is ideal for measuring speech in noise performance in children as it requires no practice and can be quickly administered.