Performance of hearing impaired children on Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices Test.
OBJECTIVE
Hearing impairment (HI) is presumed to influence the visual skills of affected children, possibly biasing their performance on tests requiring visual analyzing skills. We investigated whether such a bias would occur on Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices (CPM); a set of three subtests (labeled A, AB and B) for measurement of non-verbal intelligence.


METHODS
A sample of 62 children presenting with various degrees of HI were administered the test. Raw scores were controlled for age, and correlated to degree of HI.


RESULTS
The correlation between degree of HI and overall test score missed significance (r=0.23, P=0.07), but scores from subtest B showed a significant positive correlation with HI (r=0.37, P=0.003).


CONCLUSIONS
We conclude that severe or profound HI may lead to increased competence for task solution on subtest B. However, despite the biasing effect on this subtest, the CPM overall test score is only slightly affected.
Department of Hearing, Voice and Speech Disorders, University Hospital, Anichstrasse 35, A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria. viktor.weichbold@uklibk.ac.at
Viktor
V
Weichbold
Hermann
H
Herka
D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D034381:Hearing Loss / Q000503:physiopathology*; D006801:Humans; D007360:Intelligence; D008297:Male; D010865:Pilot Projects; D014792:Visual Acuity; D014796:Visual Perception