Development and Validation of Sentences Without Semantic Context to Complement the Basic English Lexicon Sentences.
Erin R O'Neill, Morgan N Parke, Heather A Kreft and 1 others
PMID 33049146WHAT IT FOUND
Researchers created 500 nonsense sentences to remove semantic context from speech tests.
Listeners guessed fewer than 1% of missing words in these new sentences versus 21% in normal sentences. The new lists are validated for research use and may eventually aid clinical testing for hearing loss.
Key findings
01The new nonsense sentences provide minimal semantic context, with correct guess rates of 2% or less.
02The nonsense sentence lists are equated for difficulty, with no list deviating more than 7 percentage points from the mean performance.
03The corpus is currently validated for research use in populations with hearing loss or cochlear implants, but requires further validation before clinical application.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The validation was conducted only on young adults with normal hearing, so the equivalence of the lists for older adults or those with hearing loss is not yet proven. The authors note that the corpus is currently intended for research use, and further validation is required before it can be used for clinical testing. Performance varied significantly between talkers, meaning clinicians must be careful to compare patients only against norms for the specific talker used.
Declared interests
The work was supported by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (Grant R01 DC012262). No commercial conflicts of interest were reported.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume this nonsense corpus is ready for immediate clinical diagnosis. The validation was performed on young adults with normal hearing, and the authors explicitly state that further validation in listeners with hearing loss or cochlear implants is required before clinical use.