Comparing the AzBio Sentence-in-Noise Test in English and Spanish in Bilingual Adults.

Abstract

Background: The AzBio Sentence-in-Noise Test was developed in 2011 and was successful in minimizingspeech-recognition ceiling effects, giving clinicians and researchers a more accurate representationof a listener's speech-in-noise recognition. Recently, the Spanish version of the AzBio corpus was developedas a sentence-recognition test that could similarly be used to reduce speech-recognition ceilingeffects in Spanish-speaking patients. The developers of the AzBio in Spanish included researchers andclinicians from the United States and Colombia.Purpose: The aim of this study was to determine whether the AzBio test batteries in English and Spanishare comparable in difficulty to proficient Spanish-English bilingual adults residing in the United States.Research Design: The study was designed as a standard group comparison.Study Sample: Participants included 20 Spanish-English bilinguals between the ages of 18 and 30 yearswith hearing thresholds no greater than 25 dB HL in both ears.Data Collection and Analysis: Participants listened to three lists of 20 sentences from the AzBioSentence-in-Noise Tests in English and in Spanish over two test sessions. Sentences were presentedat a +5 dB signal-to-noise ratio in 10-talker babble. Sentence-recognition scores were calculatedfrom total words repeated correctly out of total words presented for all three lists (60 sentencesin total) in each language condition. A language experience survey was used to quantify and explorelanguage experience in different dialects of Spanish.Results: Our results indicate that bilingual listeners scored similarly on the English and Spanish testcorpora on the group level. On an individual level, participants who spoke a Colombian Spanish dialectwere among the highest-performing listeners for the Spanish test corpus and among the lowest performinglisteners for the English corpus.Conclusions: The AzBio in Spanish is a highly valuable clinical tool for evaluating speech recognition inSpanish-speaking patients. Our results suggest that listeners who spoke a Colombian Spanish dialect,consistent with the location where the AzBio in Spanish test was developed, tend to perform better on theSpanish version of the test compared to the English version of the test. Thus, dialectical factors mayaffect sentence-recognition scores on the AzBio in Spanish corpus. Clinicians in the United States mustconsider dialect when administering this test corpus because the most common dialect in the United Statesis Mexican Spanish. Future research should evaluate the education level of listeners to determine the impactof language-specific vocabulary on sentence-recognition performance on both AzBio language corpora.