[Automatic hearing screening for better monitoring of hearing health using the example of the German armed forces].

In the present study, the concept of a systematic automated screening of temporary soldiers was evaluated based on the example of the ENT Department of the Bundeswehr Central Hospital Koblenz. From 2014 to 2017, anonymized data of 169 individuals were collected from the setting of the Bundeswehr Central Hospital. Included in the data are results from measurements with automated pure-tone audiometry (APTA; e.

Development and evaluation of video recordings for the OLSA matrix sentence test.

Objective: The aim was to create and validate an audiovisual version of the German matrix sentence test (MST), which uses the existing audio-only speech material.

Design: Video recordings were recorded and dubbed with the audio of the existing German MST. The current study evaluates the MST in conditions including audio and visual modalities, speech in quiet and noise, and open and closed-set response formats.

The Finnish simplified matrix sentence test for the assessment of speech intelligibility in the elderly.

A simplified version of the Finnish matrix sentence test (FMST) was developed to improve the reliability of hearing diagnostic for children and for patients with limited working memory capacity and/or vocabulary. Study 1 evaluated the word matrix of the Finnish simplified matrix sentence test (FINSIMAT) to rule out systematic differences between the new FINSIMAT test lists, and to provide reference values for normal-hearing (NH) young adults (YA). In Study 2, the FINSIMAT and the FMST were evaluated in elderly listeners with mild-to-moderate hearing impairment (HI).

Relation Between Listening Effort and Speech Intelligibility in Noise.

Purpose: Subjective ratings of listening effort might be applicable to estimate hearing difficulties at positive signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) at which speech intelligibility scores are near 100%. Hence, ratings of listening effort were compared with speech intelligibility scores at different SNRs, and the benefit of hearing aids was evaluated.

Method: Two groups of listeners, 1 with normal hearing and 1 with hearing impairment, performed adaptive speech intelligibility and adaptive listening effort tests (Adaptive Categorical Listening Effort Scaling; Krueger, Schulte, Brand, & Holube, 2017) with sentences of the Oldenburg Sentence Test (Wagener, Brand, & Kollmeier, 1999a, 1999b; Wagener, Kühnel, & Kollmeier, 1999) in 4 different maskers.

Diagnosing and Screening in a Minority Language: A Validation Study.

Purpose: The Turkish Digit Triplet Test for hearing self-screening purposes and the Turkish Matrix Test (TURMatrix) for follow-up hearing diagnostics offer an automated closed-set response format where patients respond by choosing from response alternatives. Their applicability for testing Turkish-speaking patients in their native language by German audiologists with different Turkish language skills was investigated.

Method: Tests were composed of spoken numbers (Turkish Digit Triplet Test) or sentences (TURMatrix).

[The speech audiometry using the matrix sentence test].

The matrix sentence test in which the five-word semantically unpredictable sentences presented under the background noise conditions are used as the speech material was designed and validated for many languages. The objective of the present study was to evaluate the Russian version of the matrix sentence test (RuMatrix test) in the listeners of different ages with normal hearing. At the first stage of the study, 35 listeners at the age from 18 to 33 year were examined.

Development and evaluation of the Turkish matrix sentence test.

Objectives: The Turkish matrix sentence test, TURMatrix, was developed for precise, internationally comparable speech intelligibility testing.

Design: The TURMatrix comprises a base matrix of ten well-known Turkish names, numbers, adjectives, objects, verbs, from which syntactically fixed sentences were randomly composed. Test conduction may be in an open-set (standard), or closed-set response format.

The multilingual matrix test: Principles, applications, and comparison across languages: A review.

Objective: A review of the development, evaluation, and application of the so-called 'matrix sentence test' for speech intelligibility testing in a multilingual society is provided. The format allows for repeated use with the same patient in her or his native language even if the experimenter does not understand the language.

Design: Using a closed-set format, the syntactically fixed, semantically unpredictable sentences (e.

Development of the Russian matrix sentence test.

Objective: To develop the Russian matrix sentence test for speech intelligibility measurements in noise.

Design: Test development included recordings, optimization of speech material, and evaluation to investigate the equivalency of the test lists and training. For each of the 500 test items, the speech intelligibility function, speech reception threshold (SRT: signal-to-noise ratio, SNR, that provides 50% speech intelligibility), and slope was obtained.

The development and evaluation of the Finnish Matrix Sentence Test for speech intelligibility assessment.

Conclusion: The Finnish Matrix Test is the first sentence test in noise for the Finnish language. It was developed according to the HearCom standards and provides reliable speech intelligibility measurements with highly comparable results with the other international matrix tests.

Objectives: The aim of the study was to develop an accurate speech intelligibility test in noise for the Finnish language that is comparable across different languages.

Speech-in-noise tests for multilingual hearing screening and diagnostics1.

Purpose: New complementary multilingual speech-in-noise tests in Russian, Turkish, and Spanish for hearing self-screening purposes and follow-up hearing diagnostics are compared to the speech tests of the European project, HearCom (Hearing in the Communication Society).

Method: The tests consist of spoken numbers (Digit Triplet Test; Smits, Kapteyn, & Houtgast, 2004) or sentences (Matrix Test; e.g.

Internationally comparable screening tests for listening in noise in several European languages: the German digit triplet test as an optimization prototype.

Objective: A review is given of internationally comparable speech-in-noise tests for hearing screening purposes that were part of the European HearCom project. This report describes the development, optimization, and evaluation of such tests for headphone and telephone presentation, using the example of the German digit triplet test. In order to achieve the highest possible comparability, language- and speaker-dependent factors in speech intelligibility should be compensated for.

A Spanish matrix sentence test for assessing speech reception thresholds in noise.

Objective: To develop, optimize, and evaluate a new Spanish sentence test in noise.

Design: The test comprises a basic matrix of ten names, verbs, numerals, nouns, and adjectives. From this matrix, test lists of ten sentences with an equal syntactical structure can be formed at random, with each list containing the whole speech material.

[Indication for and verification of hearing aid benefit using modern methods of speech audiometry in German].

The current guidelines for hearing aid supply in Germany employ the often criticised Freiburg monosyllabic speech test (FBE) in quiet. This test can be replaced with the monosyllabic rhyme test by von Wallenberg and Kollmeier (WaKo) in quiet and by the measurement of a speech reception threshold in an interfering noise at a moderate level (45 dB SPL) using either the Göttingen or the Oldenburg sentence test (criterion: 2 dB improvement in SNR, "signal-to-noise ratio"). This procedure was investigated in a group of 38 participants with a sensorineural hearing impairment (mild, moderate or severe hearing loss) and 11 volunteers with normal hearing.

Auditory memory for temporal characteristics of sound.

This study evaluates auditory memory for variations in the rate of sinusoidal amplitude modulation (SAM) of noise bursts in the European starling (Sturnus vulgaris). To estimate the extent of the starling's auditory short-term memory store, a delayed non-matching-to-sample paradigm was applied. The birds were trained to discriminate between a series of identical "sample stimuli" and a single "test stimulus".

Auditory memory: a comparison between humans and starlings.

In this study, we compare the processing of acoustic signals in European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) and in human listeners by observing the decay of short-term auditory memory in delayed non-matching-to-sample experiments. A series of identical "sample" stimuli and a final "test" stimulus were separated by variable delays (1 to 180.1 s).

Auditory short-term memory persistence for tonal signals in a songbird.

This paper presents an animal model for studying the persistence of auditory memory for tonal signals. Five European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) were trained in a Go/NoGo delayed nonmatching-to-sample task to discriminate between a series of identical "sample stimuli" and a single "test stimulus." Frequencies of sample and test stimuli should be classified as being either the same or different.

Analysis of spectral shape in the barn owl auditory system.

In a behavioral experiment, we investigated how efficiently barn owls (Tyto alba) could detect changes in the spectral profile of multi-component auditory signals with stochastic envelope patterns. Signals consisted of one or five bands of noise (bandwidth 4, 16, or 64 Hz each; center frequencies 1.02, 1.