Speech intelligibility tested by the Pediatric Matrix Sentence test in 3-6 year old children
Objective: The present study was aimed at the development and application of the Polish Pediatric Matrix Sentence Test (PPMST) for testing speech intelligibility in normal-hearing (NH) and hearing-impaired (HI) children aged 3-6. Methods & Procedures: The test was based on sentences of the subject-verb-object pattern. Pictures illustrating PPMST utterances were prepared and the picture-point (PP) method was used for administering the 1-up/1-down adaptive procedure converging the signal to noise ratio (SNR) to the speech reception threshold (SRT). The correctness of verbal responses (VR), preceding PP responses, was also judged. Outcomes & Results: The normative SRT for the PP method was shown to decrease with age. The guessing rate (gamma) turned out to be close to the theoretical value for forced-choice procedures, gamma = 1/n, where n = 6 for the six-alternative PP method (gamma approximate to 0.166) and n = 4 for the four-alternative PP method (gamma approximate to 0.25). Test optimization resulted in minimizing the lapse rate (lambda) (ratio gamma/lambda approximate to 8.0 for n = 4 and gamma/lambda approximate to 5.6 for n = 6, both for NH and HI children). Significantly higher SRTs were observed for HI children than for the NH group. Conclusions & Implications: For children aged 3-6, tested by the developed PPMST, speech intelligibility performance, for both the VR and PP method, increases with age. For each age group, significantly worse intelligibility was observed for HI children than for NH children. The PPMST combined with the PP method is a reliable tool for pediatric speech intelligibility measurements. (c) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
speech reception threshold speech intelligibility in children sentence matrix test