Development of the Children's English and Spanish Speech Recognition Test: Psychometric Properties, Feasibility, Reliability, and Normative Data.
Lori J Leibold, Emily Buss, Margaret K Miller and 5 others
PMID 38334698WHAT IT FOUND
Children could complete this English/Spanish picture-pointing speech recognition test, and scores were stable enough for initial norms.
It does not yet show how children with hearing loss perform.
Key findings
01The child experiment recruited 83 Spanish/English bilingual children and 89 English monolingual children, and all completed the assigned testing.
02When English monolingual children were tested twice, scores in speech-shaped noise showed moderate stability and scores in competing speech showed strong stability.
03The study provided age-based expected score ranges for English and Spanish masked speech recognition scores in children with normal hearing.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The child sample had normal hearing and no reported speech, language, or cognitive delays, so the results do not show how children with hearing loss perform. Normative models were based on child age only, not on language proficiency or dominance, because those are not usually measured during pediatric audiological visits. Maternal education differed between the bilingual and monolingual groups, so family language background and socioeconomic factors were not balanced. Some outlier scores were removed before the normative analyses, including very young children with limited English proficiency. Trying to make every word equally difficult across maskers did not work consistently, so the final test used the original level calibration. The paper does not report whether the test changes diagnosis, treatment planning, or communication outcomes.
Declared interests
The article is tagged as NIH extramural research support. The supplied text does not include an author conflict-of-interest declaration.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude this test is validated for children with hearing loss or that it improves outcomes. The child sample had normal hearing, and the paper reports test development and norms, not treatment effects.