Assessment of the Clinical Utility of the Sentence Identification Test in Kannada for Adults

Abstract

Introduction: A sentence identification test was developed by Geetha, Kumar, Manjula, and Pavan (2014) in the Kannada language. The test consists of 25 equivalent sentence lists with 10 sentences each. The present study aimed to assess the clinical utility of this test.Material and methods: All sentences were presented to 5 groups of adults with 10 individuals in each group. Four groups, each of 10 individuals, had hearing loss: mild, moderate, moderately-severe, or severe. The fifth group had 40 individuals with normal hearing sensitivity. Standardized lists of 25 sentences were presented monaurally at the most comfortable level in a sound-treated double room. The number of correctly identified words was tabulated. Results:The mean identification scores decreased with increase in the degree of hearing loss, although the scores were comparable between the normal and mild group. A comparison of scores between each list within each group revealed that there was no significant difference between the lists for the scores obtained from the individuals with mild, moderate, moderately-severe, and severe degrees of hearing loss. Conclusions:The developed sentence material is sensitive to differences in speech identification ability across different degrees of hearing loss. In addition, the mean number of correctly identified words do not vary across the lists in any of the four groups, suggesting equivalency across the standardized 25 lists in the clinical groups.