Development of Minimal Pair Test in Tamil (MPT-T)

Abstract

Introduction: Speech perception testing provides an accurate measurement of the child’s ability to perceive and distinguish the various phonetic segments and patterns of the sounds. From among the many types of speech stimuli used, minimal pairs can also be used to assess the phoneme recognition skills. Thus, the study focused on developing Minimal Pair Test in Tamil (MPT-T). Aim: The aim of the present study was to develop and validate the MPT in Tamil on Normal Hearing (NH) children and paediatric cochlear implantees (CI). Materials and Methods: It was an experimental study which included school going children in the age range of six to eight years and the duration of the study was 12 months. The test was developed in two phases. The first phase focussed on the construction of the word list, recording of the word pairs and the preparation of the test. The second phase was administration of the test on NH children and paediatric cochlear implantees. The test scores were analysed using Mann Whitney U test, Kruskal Wallis and Wilcoxon signed-rank test. The results showed a statistical significance between the NH group and the paediatric cochlear implantees. Results: The present study included 40 NH children and 15 paediatric cochlear implantees through purposive sampling method. The specific speech feature analysis of the paediatric cochlear implantees revealed that there was difficulty identifying the word pairs differing in Vowel Length (VL) and the best performed feature was Place of Articulation (POA). The results showed statistical significance between the NH group and the paediatric cochlear implantees. Conclusion: The developed test can be effectively used in clinic for assessing speech perception abilities of pediatric Cochlear Implantees and also in planning the rehabilitative goals.