Age Dependence of Thresholds for Speech in Noise in Normal-Hearing Adolescents.
Irene Jacobi, Marya Sheikh Rashid, Jan A P M de Laat and 1 others
PMID 29212433WHAT IT FOUND
Normal-hearing adolescents needed louder speech relative to background noise than adults, improving by -0.2 dB per year.
A poor speech-in-noise screen at age 12 may reflect maturation, not hearing loss.
Key findings
01Speech reception thresholds improved significantly by -0.2 dB per year of age, while gender and education level did not show significant effects.
02The first Oorcheck test averaged -19.2 dB SNR and the retest averaged -19.7 dB SNR; the difference was significant and was described as a learning effect.
03The proposed age-corrected cut-off uses -0.2 dB per year: -17.2 dB SNR for 12-year-olds and -18.4 dB SNR for young adults of 18 years and older.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The final analysis included only 72 normal-hearing participants, and the adult control group had only 10 participants. The authors caution that small subgroups require careful interpretation of gender and education results. The authors say larger samples are needed to confirm that education level and gender are not important. The authors say it is not clear whether the age-corrected cut-offs affect the test's ability to detect hearing loss. Twenty-three of 104 assessed were excluded for elevated pure-tone thresholds, so the analysed sample was selected for normal hearing. The test rooms were quiet but not soundproof, and low-frequency hearing thresholds were allowed to be up to 25 dB HL at 250 and 500 Hz.
The easy way to misread this
Do not use the proposed age-corrected cut-off to diagnose hearing loss or to change screening accuracy. The study tested only normal-hearing adolescents and did not verify whether the correction helps detect hearing loss.