The Children’s English and Spanish Speech Recognition Test (ChEgSS): Normative data

Abstract

The Children’s English and Spanish Speech Recognition Test (ChEgSS) is a clinical tool for assessing children’s English and Spanish word recognition in a noise or two-talker masker. The English and Spanish versions of the test are acoustically, phonetically, and linguistically similar. The goal of this study was to establish threshold norms for Spanish-English bilingual and English monolingual children, and to evaluate effects of age and language proficiency on performance. Participants were 81 Spanish-English bilingual and 89 English monolingual children (4–17 years) with normal hearing. Children completed word recognition testing using an adaptive, 4AFC procedure with a picture-pointing response. All children completed testing in both a noise and a two-talker masker. Bilingual children were tested in English and in Spanish, and monolingual children were tested in English. Language proficiency was assessed using standardized assessments of receptive vocabulary as well as parent report. Both groups of children performed more poorly in two-talker speech than in speech-shaped noise. Preliminary results indicate that age and receptive vocabulary were significant predictors of word recognition performance in both languages and for both maskers. Performance for balanced bilinguals (i.e., similar language proficiency in Spanish and English) was similar for Spanish and English stimuli.