Development of a test of Korean Speech Intelligibility in Noise(KSPIN) using sentence materials with controlled word predictability

소음환경에서 표적단어의 예상도가 조절된 한국어의 문장검사목록개발 시안

This paper describes a test of everyday speech understanding ability, in which a listener's utilization of the context-situational information of speech is assessed, and is compared with the utilization of acoustic-phonetic information. The test items are sentences which are presented in a babble type of noise, and the listener response is the key word in the sentence. The key words are always two-syllabic nouns and the questioning sentences are added to obtain the responding key words. Two types of sentences are used. One is the high-predictable sentences for which the key word is somewhat predictable from the context. The other is the low-predictable sentences for which the key-word cannot be predicted from the context. Both types are included in six 40-item forms of the test, which are balanced for intelligibility, key-word familiarity and predictability, phonetic content, and length. Performance of normally hearing listeners shows significantly different functions for various signal-to-noise ratios. The potential applications of this test, particularly in the assessment of speech understanding ability in the hearing impaired, are discussed.