The digits-in-noise test: assessing auditory speech recognition abilities in noise.

A speech-in-noise test which uses digit triplets in steady-state speech noise was developed. The test measures primarily the auditory, or bottom-up, speech recognition abilities in noise. Digit triplets were formed by concatenating single digits spoken by a male speaker. Level corrections were made to individual digits to create a set of homogeneous digit triplets with steep speech recognition functions. The test measures the speech reception threshold (SRT) in long-term average speech-spectrum noise via a 1-up, 1-down adaptive procedure with a measurement error of 0.7 dB. One training list is needed for naive listeners. No further learning effects were observed in 24 subsequent SRT measurements. The test was validated by comparing results on the test with results on the standard sentences-in-noise test. To avoid the confounding of hearing loss, age, and linguistic skills, these measurements were performed in normal-hearing subjects with simulated hearing loss. The signals were spectrally smeared and/or low-pass filtered at varying cutoff frequencies. After correction for measurement error the correlation coefficient between SRTs measured with both tests equaled 0.96. Finally, the feasibility of the test was approved in a study where reference SRT values were gathered in a representative set of 1386 listeners over 60 years of age.