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The National Auditory Capabilities Database (NACD)The preceding discussion mentioned the lack of any national or international standards for auditory abilities other than for the detection of pure tones (sensitivity). One reason to make the TBAC available in a convenient form is that if it is widely used it may allow the establishment of performance standards for additional auditory abilities. To facilitate the creation of such a database, CDT, Inc., has designed the TBAC scoring procedures so that the data from each application of the test battery are uploaded for inclusion in the National Auditory Capabilities Database (NACD). To make the database maximally useful, a modest amount of demographic information is requested, although test may be scored without providing that information. Specifically the requested information includes age, sex, known hearing problems if any, native language, and years of formal musical training. It is important to emphasize that it is the TBAC users responsibility to identify individual listeners with a coded number rather than the listeners name. Names will be immediately deleted from any data files that arrive at CDT, Inc. and will be replaced by locally generated numerical codes. No record of actual names will be retained by CDT, Inc. Purchasers of the TBAC will receive regular updates showing the breakdown of performance on each of the subtests and on the derived measures of ability, for the various subgroups that will be established through use of the requested demographic data. These will include at least age ranges, sex, musical training, reported hearing problems, and the persons native language. No claims of clinical significance of listeners performance on the TBAC-4 subtests, or of the auditory ability measures derived from those performance measures are made by. It is only claimed that they are reliable measures of performance, and that the derived measures are the only such theoretically based estimates of fundamental auditory capabilities currently available (Kidd et al., 2007). These measures may be found to be a useful research tool for projects comparing the auditory abilities of various populations, however it must be stressed that none of the versions of the TBAC have been used with persons younger than about 17 years of age. It is strongly suspected that if children are tested with the TBAC, they will do less well than adults on all of the subtests, and probably the differences will be greater on the subtests with more complex stimuli (Subtests 4-8). The developers of the TBAC-4 are extremely interested in learning about the outcomes of research projects, or about academic courses in which this test battery is utilized. We would be happy to discuss such projects or pedagogical uses of the battery, in the event that our experience with this instrument might be of value. (Contact support@comdistec.com) |
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