Contribution
Development of the Everyday Conversational Danish Sentence Test
* Presenting author
Abstract:
Traditional audiological tests often fail to replicate real-world listening environments, resulting in discrepancies between clinical assessments and patient experiences. Tests commonly used in Danish clinical practice involve recorded words or sentences read aloud verbatim, which do not adequately represent real-life communication. This study outlines the development of speech material for more ecologically valid speech-in-noise testing. Sentences were extracted from recordings of spontaneous dialogues between a female talker and two partners. Each pair communicated both in quiet and noisy conditions to elicit normal and raised vocal efforts. 460 sentences were extracted, half of them with a normal vocal effort and half with a raised vocal effort. These sentences will be level-normalized and presented to 40 normal-hearing at five signal-to-noise ratios ranging from -10 to 0 dB in 2.5 dB steps. Psychometric functions will be fitted to each sentence based on the measured intelligibility scores. Preliminary findings indicate an average speech reception threshold (SRT50) of -5.2 dB SNR and slope of 9.8%/dB. Sentences will be normalized to align their individual SRT50 with the mean SRT50 and then divided into balanced lists. The ECO-DAST material can be paired with more realistic background noise to provide assessments that better reflect everyday listening challenges.