auditory recognition of persian digits in presence of speech-spectrum noise and multi-talker babble: a validation study

Background and aim: digits are suitable speech materials for evaluating recognition of speech-in-noise in clients with the wide range of language abilities. farsi auditory recognition of digit-in-noise (fardin) test has been deve-loped and validated in learning-disabled child-ren showing dichotic listening deficit. this stu-dy was conducted for further validation of fardin and to survey the effects of noise type on the recognition performance in individuals with sensory-neural hearing impairment. methods: persian monosyllabic digits 1−10 were extracted from the audio file of fardin test. ten lists were compiled using a random order of the triplets. the first five lists were mixed with multi-talker babble noise (mtbn) and the second five lists with speech-spectrum noise (ssn). signal- to- noise ratio (snr) var-ied from +5 to −15 in 5 db steps. 20 normal hearing and 19 hearing-impaired individuals participated in the current study. results: both types of noise could differentiate the hearing loss from normal hearing. hearing-impaired group showed weaker performance for digit recognition in mtbn and ssn and needed 4−5.6 db higher snr (50%), compared to the normal hearing group. mtbn was more challenging for normal hearing than ssn. conclusion: farsi auditory recognition of digit-in-noise is a validated test for estimating snr (50%) in clients with hearing loss. it seems ssn is more appropriate for using as a back-ground noise for testing the performance of aud-itory recognition of digit-in-noise.