Comparison of the Oldenburg Sentence Test and the German Hearing in Noise Test

The well-established German Oldenburg Sentence Test (OLSA) and the Hearing in Noise Test (HINT) are frequently used in audiological research; the latter of which was recently published in German (Joiko et al. 2021). Both sentence tests examine speech intelligibility in noise, but differ in sentence structure, calibration and scoring procedure. In this paper, the comparability of the measurement results of both tests, and differences in response time (an objective measure related to the listening effort) will be investigated. A total of ten test subjects with normal hearing took part in the study. The speech signal was presented from 0°. The background noise was presented from 180° at a level of 65 dB(A) for the HINT and 65 dB SPL for the OLSA. Following initial training, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the speech recognition threshold (SRT) at 50% was determined applying an adaptive measurement procedure with a starting SNR of 0 dB. The evaluation is done according to the standards of the OLSA and HINT, with word scoring and sentence scoring, respectively. Speech intelligibility was measured at various fixed SNRs (Harianawala 2019) and the measurement results were analyzed applying both sentence and word scoring. Psychometric functions were fitted to the measured values and 70% thresholds were estimated. The response time of the test participants was determined as the period between the end of the presented test sentence and the beginning of the spoken repetition of the test sentence. Results revealed a significantly lower SNR for the SRT 50% threshold for the OLSA than for the HINT. This can be explained by the evaluation differences between sentence and word scoring methods. When analyzing the SNR-dependent speech intelligibility and the 70% thresholds of the psychometric functions, it was shown that the OLSA and the HINT are not significantly different if the same scoring procedure is applied. We conclude that the results of the OLSA and the HINT could be comparable if measurement and scoring procedures are considered. When analyzing response time, it was found that an increasing SNR results in a decrease in response time. It was also determined that the response times of the OLSA are significantly lower than those of the HINT. The lower response times for the OLSA may be an indication of lower listening effort and lower cognition compared to the HINT.