Spahr Anthony J, Dorman Michael F, Litvak Leonid M, Cook Sarah J, Loiselle Louise M, DeJong Melissa D, Hedley-Williams Andrea, Sunderhaus Linsey S, Hayes Catherine A, Gifford René H
1Department of Research and Technology, Advanced Bionics Corporation, Valencia, California, USA; 2Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA; 3Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA; and 4Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, USA.
Ear Hear. 2014 Jul-Aug;35(4):418-22. doi: 10.1097/AUD.0000000000000031.
The goal of this study was to create and validate a new set of sentence lists that could be used to evaluate the speech-perception abilities of listeners with hearing loss in cases where adult materials are inappropriate due to difficulty level or content. The authors aimed to generate a large number of sentence lists with an equivalent level of difficulty for the evaluation of performance over time and across conditions.
The original Pediatric AzBio sentence corpus included 450 sentences recorded from one female talker. All sentences included in the corpus were successfully repeated by kindergarten and first-grade students with normal hearing. The mean intelligibility of each sentence was estimated by processing each sentence through a cochlear implant simulation and calculating the mean percent correct score achieved by 15 normal-hearing listeners. After sorting sentences by mean percent correct scores, 320 sentences were assigned to 16 lists of equivalent difficulty. List equivalency was then validated by presenting all sentence lists, in a novel random order, to adults and children with hearing loss. A final-validation stage examined single-list comparisons from adult and pediatric listeners tested in research or clinical settings.
The results of the simulation study allowed for the creation of 16 lists of 20 sentences. The average intelligibility of each list ranged from 78.4 to 78.7%. List equivalency was then validated, when the results of 16 adult cochlear implant users and 9 pediatric hearing aid and cochlear implant users revealed no significant differences across lists. The binomial distribution model was used to account for the inherent variability observed in the lists. This model was also used to generate 95% confidence intervals for one and two list comparisons. A retrospective analysis of 361 instances from 78 adult cochlear implant users and 48 instances from 36 pediatric cochlear implant users revealed that the 95% confidence intervals derived from the model captured 94% of all responses (385 of 409).
The cochlear implant simulation was shown to be an effective method for estimating the intelligibility of individual sentences for use in the evaluation of cochlear implant users. Furthermore, the method used for constructing equivalent sentence lists and estimating the inherent variability of the materials has also been validated. Thus, the AzBio Pediatric Sentence Lists are equivalent and appropriate for the assessment of speech-understanding abilities of children with hearing loss as well as adults for whom performance on AzBio sentences is near the floor.
本研究的目的是创建并验证一套新的句子列表，用于评估听力损失患者的言语感知能力，这些患者由于难度水平或内容原因，成人材料不适用。作者旨在生成大量难度相当的句子列表，以便评估不同时间和条件下的表现。
原始的儿科AzBio句子语料库包含从一名女性说话者录制的450个句子。语料库中包含的所有句子均被听力正常的幼儿园和一年级学生成功重复。通过人工耳蜗模拟处理每个句子，并计算15名听力正常的听众获得的平均正确百分比分数，来估计每个句子的平均可懂度。根据平均正确百分比分数对句子进行排序后，将320个句子分配到16个难度相当的列表中。然后，通过以新颖的随机顺序向听力损失的成人和儿童呈现所有句子列表，来验证列表的等效性。最后一个验证阶段检查了在研究或临床环境中测试的成人和儿科听众的单列表比较。
模拟研究的结果使得能够创建16个包含20个句子的列表。每个列表的平均可懂度在78.4%至78.7%之间。当16名成人人工耳蜗使用者以及9名儿科助听器和人工耳蜗使用者的结果显示各列表之间无显著差异时，列表等效性得到了验证。二项分布模型用于解释列表中观察到的固有变异性。该模型还用于生成单列表和双列表比较的95%置信区间。对78名成人人工耳蜗使用者的361个实例和36名儿科人工耳蜗使用者的48个实例进行的回顾性分析表明，该模型得出的95%置信区间涵盖了所有反应的94%（409个中的385个）。
人工耳蜗模拟被证明是一种有效的方法，可用于估计用于评估人工耳蜗使用者的单个句子的可懂度。此外，用于构建等效句子列表和估计材料固有变异性的方法也得到了验证。因此，AzBio儿科句子列表是等效的，适用于评估听力损失儿童以及在AzBio句子上表现接近下限的成人的言语理解能力。
