Speech Audiometry

Question 1

Internal & external variables that can affect results and other considerations

Answer 1

-Internal Factors
Developmental age
Receptive vocabulary
Language competency
Cognitive abilities

-External Factors
Designation of appropriate response task
Effective reinforcement
Controlling memory load inherent in the task

Results may be more reflective of child’s interest and motivation for the task than actual recognition abilities
Many children are too shy to speak in the test room environment
Articulation difficulties
Picture pointing tasks

Question 2

PBK

Answer 2

-Haskins (1949)–master’s thesis
-Phonetically balanced word lists
-Based on receptive vocabulary of kindergarten children
-Normal hearing preschoolers at 3.5 years of age yielded scores substantially lower on the PB-K words than older children
Children with limited vocab skills may score poorly because the words on the test are too difficult (Meyer & Pisoni, 1999)
Very young
Profoundly deaf

for ages 5-6—> see sanderson and leepa rintelmann article

Question 3

WIPI

Answer 3

Ross and Lerman (1970)
Takes into consideration children with restricted vocabularies who cannot read
25 picture plates
Closed set of six items per picture plate
Four of the illustrations have words that rhyme, other two are presented as distractors to decrease the probability of a correct guess
Sanderson-Leepa and Rintelmann (1976) found that NH children at 3.5 years of age made a significant number of errors due to vocabulary limitations
Appropriate for receptive language age of 4 years and greater
Ross & Lerman concluded that it is suitable for children with moderate HL from ages 5 or 6 and severe HL from ages 7 or 8

Question 4

NU-CHIPS

Answer 4

Northwestern University Children’s Perception of Speech test (Elliott and Katz, 1980)
50 monosyllabic words documented to be in recognition vocab of children with normal hearing as young as 3 years of age
Children with HL and a receptive language age of at least 2.5 years demonstrate familiarity of the words and pictures
Closed set of 4, picture-pointing response
Test items are representative of the most frequently occurring phonemes of English (with exception of initial /r/)

closed set 4 vs 6

Question 5

LNT & MLNT

Answer 5

Kirk, Pisoni, & Osberger (1995)
Lexical characteristics, such as word frequency and lexical similarity have been shown to affect accuracy of spoken word recognition in NH listeners
“Lexical neighbors”–phonetically similar words that differ by one phoneme from the target words
E.g.: cat, cap, bat, scat, cut, etc.
Words that occur frequently and have few lexical neighbors are considered “easy”
Words with many lexical neighbors that occur less frequently are considered “hard”

Question 6

How to test people w/ limited WR abilities

Answer 6

**MTS***
2 presentations of 12 pictured words: 
---4 monosyllables
---4 trochees (2 syllable words w/ more stress on the first)
---4 spondees
Picture pointing task
2 scores obtained
--# of times correct stress pattern was identified
--# of words correctly identified

Glendonald Auditory Screening Procedure Erber (1982)
Closed set of 12 words, similar to MTS
3 monosyllables, 3 trochees, 3 spondees, 3 polysyllables
10 common everyday sentences
Phoneme detection task

See slides for more