A test to determine the auditory speech perception ability of hearing‐impaired children

Abstract

Differences of auditory speech perception ability between 12 normal‐hearing children (average age 9 years, 3 months), and 12 children (average age 9 years, 7 months) with severe hearing loss (better‐ear pure‐tone average between 85 and 92 dB ANSI) were determined by a test of auditory speech perception. The test consisted of 64 pairs of recorded consonant‐vowel speech signals. The recorded speech signals were carefully analyzed to insure control over intensity, frequency, and duration differences. Then the test‐speech signals purposely were varied in terms of intensity, frequency and duration. Subjects were required to determine if the two speech signals in each pair were the same or different based upon one of the three variables. Results indicated that the children with normal hearing performed significantly higher than the hearing‐impaired children. Implications are discussed.