Picard M, Banville R, Barbarosie T, Manolache M
Ecole d'orthophonie et d'audiologie, Université de Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Audiology. 1999 Jan-Feb;38(1):30-43. doi: 10.3109/00206099909073000.
The speech recognition threshold (SRT) is believed to be related primarily to the pure-tone average (PTA) and the steepness of the hearing loss. However, there are indications that it may also be influenced by perceptual or cognitive-linguistic factors, or both, such as meaningfulness of the speech stimuli. The purpose of the present study was to ascertain the correspondence between SRT and PTA in noise-exposed workers with various degrees of speech recognition threshold shift in noise. To this end, a total of 807 SRTs and PTAs collected from fluent speakers of Quebec French noise-exposed workers were compared. Measurements of context effects on speech recognition were taken based on a general hypothesis that they should be facilitating phoneme or word restoration in conditions of high stimulus uncertainty as present in SRT assessment, thus acting to confound the SRT PTA relationship. Using principal components analysis, we found a significant effect not only of low-frequency hearing sensitivity but language context effects on SRT. After a correction was introduced to partial out these linguistic context effects, correlations between SRT and PTA increased but they were lower than predicted. In a related treatment analysis, we found a large number of observations (230 out of 807) where SRTs were more sensitive than PTAs by a factor of 8 to 16 dB. This was the case even though correlations between the two measurements were within the range commonly advocated in the field of clinical audiology (0.85-0.95). This was interpreted as a sign of phonological and lexical context effects on the speech recognition task actually used by individual subjects to facilitate speech understanding, to the point perhaps of making it as simple as the detection of pure tones.
言语识别阈值（SRT）被认为主要与纯音平均听阈（PTA）以及听力损失的陡度有关。然而，有迹象表明，它也可能受到感知或认知语言因素的影响，或者两者兼而有之，比如言语刺激的意义性。本研究的目的是确定在噪声环境中暴露且言语识别阈值有不同程度变化的工人中，SRT与PTA之间的对应关系。为此，我们比较了从魁北克法语流利的噪声暴露工人那里收集到的总共807个SRT和PTA数据。基于一个一般假设进行了言语识别情境效应的测量，即它们应该在SRT评估中存在的高刺激不确定性条件下促进音素或单词恢复，从而混淆SRT与PTA的关系。使用主成分分析，我们发现不仅低频听力敏感度，而且语言情境效应都对SRT有显著影响。在引入校正以排除这些语言情境效应后，SRT与PTA之间的相关性增加了，但仍低于预期。在一项相关的处理分析中，我们发现大量观察结果（807个中有230个），其中SRT比PTA敏感8至16分贝。即便这两项测量之间的相关性在临床听力学领域通常所主张的范围内（0.85 - 0.95），情况依然如此。这被解释为音系和词汇情境效应的一个迹象，表明个体受试者在实际用于促进言语理解的言语识别任务中，可能达到了像检测纯音一样简单的程度。
