Speech audiometry in quiet with the Oldenburg Sentence Test for Children.
OBJECTIVE
To assess speech perception in children, speech audiometric sentence tests are generally better suited than single word tests because of their steeper discrimination function and thus higher sensitivity. A disadvantage of older German single word speech audiometric tests for children is their inapplicability in quiet and in noise. Moreover, their discrimination functions are shallower than those of optimized sentence tests, particularly in noise. The Oldenburg sentence test for children (Oldenburger Kinder-Satztest; OlKiSa) has already been shown to test reliably the speech perception in noise in normal-hearing children. Testing hearing-impaired children in noise, however, may be difficult. Therefore, quality criteria and norms for testing in quiet are also needed.


METHODS
The OlKiSa in quiet was validated with 224 normal-hearing children between ages 4 to 10 years.


RESULTS
The discrimination functions are steeper (6.4 to 10.7 %/dB) than those of the commonly used German single word tests. Age-specific standards for 50% speech perception in quiet (speech reception threshold, SRT) are provided.


CONCLUSIONS
The OlKiSa is a valid audiometric test to quantify speech perception in quiet in children from age 4.
Department of Phoniatrics and Pediatric Audiology, ENT Clinic, Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main, Theodor-Stern-Kai 7, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Katrin.Neumann@em.uni-frankfurt.de
Katrin
K
Neumann
Nicola
N
Baumeister
Uwe
U
Baumann
Ulrike
U
Sick
Harald A
HA
Euler
Tobias
T
Weissgerber
D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D009622:Noise; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013067:Speech Perception; D013069:Speech Reception Threshold Test