An Evaluation of the BKB-SIN, HINT, QuickSIN, and WIN Materials on Listeners with Normal Hearing and Listeners with Hearing Loss.

Purpose The purpose of this study was to examine in listeners with normal hearing and listeners with sensorineural hearing loss the within- and between-group differences obtained with 4 commonly available speech-in-noise protocols. Method Recognition performances by 24 listeners with normal hearing and 72 listeners with sensorineural hearing loss were compared for 4 speech-in-noise protocols that varied with respect to the amount of contextual cues conveyed in the target signal. The protocols studied included the Bamford-Kowal-Bench Speech-in-Noise Test (BKB-SIN; Etymōtic Research, 2005; J. Bench, A. Kowal, & J. Bamford, 1979; P. Niquette et al., 2003), the Quick Speech-in-Noise Test (QuickSIN; M. C. Killion, P. A. Niquette, G. I. Gudmundsen, L. J. Revit, & S. Banerjee, 2004), and the Words-in-Noise test (WIN; R. H. Wilson, 2003; R. H. Wilson & C. A. Burks, 2005), each of which used multitalker babble and a modified method of constants, as well as the Hearing in Noise Test (HINT; M. Nilsson, S. Soli, & J....