Speech recognition in noise in individuals with normal hearing and tinnitus

ABSTRACT

Introduction  Auditory performance for suprathreshold sounds may be compromised even when the audiogram is normal. Patients with tinnitus but without hearing loss often complain of speech recognition difficulties, especially in noisy environments.

Purpose  To investigate the performance in noise tests in individuals with normal hearing thresholds with and without tinnitus.

Methods  Twenty adult individuals were evaluated, aged between 18 and 45 years, with hearing within normal limits, presenting or not with tinnitus symptoms, divided into two groups, the tinnitus group and the control group. The SRTN (sentence recognition threshold in noise) were surveyed with the LSP test (list of sentences in Portuguese).

Results  The tinnitus group had the worst performance for the two noises used, but with a statistically significant difference only when using “speech-noise”.

Conclusion  We found that the performance of individuals with normal hearing and tinnitus in speech recognition in the presence of background noise is poorer than in patients without the symptom mainly in step obtained with speech-shaped noise.

Tinnitus; Auditory pathways; Hearing tests; Speech intelligibility; Signal-to-noise ratio