Development and preliminary evaluation of a new test of ongoing speech comprehension

Objective: The overall goal of this work is to create new speech perception tests that more closely resemble real world communication and offer an alternative or complement to the commonly used sentence recall test. Design: We describe the development of a new ongoing speech comprehension test based on short everyday passages and on-the-go questions. We also describe the results of an experiment conducted to compare the psychometric properties of this test to those of a sentence test. Study sample: Both tests were completed by a group of listeners that included normal hearers as well as hearing-impaired listeners who participated with and without their hearing aids. Results: Overall, the psychometric properties of the two tests were similar, and thresholds were significantly correlated. However, there was some evidence of age/cognitive effects in the comprehension test that were not revealed by the sentence test. Conclusions: This new comprehension test promises to be useful for the larger goal of creating laboratory tests that combine realistic acoustic environments with realistic communication tasks. Further efforts will be required to assess whether the test can ultimately improve predictions of real-world outcomes.