The Hearing in Noise Test for Children (HINT-C) was originally designed as an adaptive procedure to measure thresholds of speech recognition for sentence material in a variety of signal to noise ratios. It has been adapted for our purpose to measure speech recognition in quiet at average conversational levels. The test consists of 13 lists of 10 phonetically balanced sentences that have been found appropriate for children 5 years of age and older. The recorded version (compact disc) of the test is used to administer two lists of sentences per evaluation.
All patients 5 years of age or older should be administered the HINT-C at all postoperative evaluations. The test is presented in the sound field at an approximate conversational level of 70 dB SPL. Two sentence lists must be administered. The child should be instructed to Listen carefully and repeat the sentence you hear. Repeat ay of the words that you can. It is fine to guess if you are not sure. Performance is scored by percentage of words (N=varies per list) and sentences (N=20) correctly repeated. The child must repeat the entire sentence to receive credit for the complete sentence. Oral/verbal responses are acceptable. Key words are underlined in each phrase. The chance score is 0% on this open-set test.
The child should be placed 1 meter from the sound field speaker at 0% azimuth. With a sound level meter microphone near the child’s headpiece, calibrate to the appropriate presentation level. When using the 1k Hz calibration tone on these materials, the speech stimuli will be 10 dB lower, i.e., the items will be presented at 60 dB SPL rather than 70 dB SPL. For the purposes of this study, calibrate the output of the audiometer so that the speech stimuli are 70 dB SPL at the microphone of the patient’s headpiece. Younger children may need cueing prior to the presentation of each sentence because there is no carrier phrase.
Download Sentence Lists and Score Sheets>>
Nilsson MJ, Soli SD, Gelnett DJ. Development of the sharing in noise test for children (HINT-C). House Ear Institute; 1996.
Nilsson MJ, Soli SD, Sumida A. Development of norms and percent intelligibility functions for the HINT. House Ear Institute; 1995.
