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Effects of signal-to-noise ratio on the nonsense syllable test.

Over the past few years, Danhauer and his colleagues (1-5) have shown that the Edgerton and Danhauer nonsense syllable test (NST) (1) may be a useful part of the speech perception test battery for normally hearing and hearing-impaired adults and children. Recently, we provided data for 20 normally hearing young adults’ performance on the NST in various noise competitors at a single signal-to-noise ratio (SN), 0 dB (5). Listeners’ responses were scored on a whole-word basis and indicated that the NST is sufficiently difficult in quiet to not warrant testing in noise regardless of the noise types tested, at least at the SN. We have since expanded our earlier (5) study by (a) investigating the effects of noise competitors on the NST at different SNs and (b) determining whether noise is needed with the NST at SNs other than 0 dB. Five native English speaking, normally hearing, young adults (23-32 yr of age) served as listeners for this investigation. They all had pure-tone thresholds <25 dB HTL for the octave frequencies 250 to 8000 Hz and no reported history of hearing loss or ear disease. All listeners were experienced with phonetic transcription. The methodology used here was the same as that in our earlier study (5). The listeners were informed that a competing signal would be present throughout the procedure, but that they should disregard it and attend only to the speech stimuli presented. Six signal-to-noise ratios (SNs), -1 0, -7, -5, 0, +lo, +20 dB, were used based on pilot data which indicated that these levels should be sufficient for defining the effectiveness of the noise competitors. The NST stimuli were always presented at 50 dB HTL; the level of each noise competitor was varied around the NST to achieve each SN. The listeners’ mean percent correct NST scores, standard deviations, and ranges within each of the three competing noise conditions and across the six SNs are presented in Table 1. As expected, these results show increasingly better listener performance as the SN improved. Separate one-way analyses of variance (ANOVAs) generally revealed no major differences among the three noise competitors. Post hoc analyses revealed that all the SNs were significantly different from each other, except Table 1. Listeners’ mean percent correct scores (x), standard deviations (SDs), and ranges (in percent) for the NST in three noise conditions: Bowling Green Multitalker Noise (BGMTN), White Noise (WN), and Amplitude Modulated White Noise (AM)