Evaluation of Four Spanish Word-Recognition-Ability Lists

Abstract

Tests of word recognition ability (formerly Speech Discrimination) should be suitable for the linguistic background of the person being tested. Few efforts have been made to develop a standardized test in the Spanish language. Current literature reports on six studies that have several drawbacks. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate a commercially available Spanish language test. The material consists of four lists of 50 bisyllabic tetraphonemic Spanish words. The words were recorded at a professional laboratory (Auditec of St. Louis) by a native Spanish speaker. In the present study, the lists were evaluated in terms of interlist equivalence, word difficulty, intelligibility of the talker, and slope of the performance/intensity (PI) function. Taped lists were presented to 16 normal-hearing native Spanish speaking adults at four presentation levels. Mean intelligibility scores were poorest for list three. Statistical analysis indicated that the intelligibility of list three is significantly different than the other lists at the 0.05 level. On the average, at low presentation levels, the nine subjects of Mexican origin obtained better scores than the seven subjects of other nationalities. The slope of the PI-PB function (4.3%) was comparable to that obtained by other investigators of English lists. The words most frequently missed contain the Is/ sound and are words that retain their meaning even after deletion of the final /s/. The talker's speech intelligibility was judged to be very clear.

Psychometrically equivalent mandarin bisyllabic speech discrimination materials spoken by male and female talkers

“…First, recordings should use native talkers who exhibit a standard dialect of the target language (Weisleder & Hodgson, 1989). Evaluation of speech discrimination using recordings in a non-native dialect may significantly reduce performance, especially at presentation levels B/50 dB SPL (Wilson & Moodley, 2000).…”

Development of a Turkish Monosyllabic Word Recognition Test for Adults

“…They are also used to aid in making differential diagnoses between peripheral and central auditory pathologies [1][2][3][4] . The use of appropriate speech materials is crucial to ensure the reliability and diagnostic sensitivity of word recognition tests [2,5] , which may be affected by a number of factors, such as the contents of the list, word selection homogeneity [6,7] , the accent of the speaker [5,[8][9][10][11] , the method and level of presentation [12,13] , subject factors [13] , and the type of recording [9] . Significant differences in speech audiometry results in hearing-impaired populations due to the speaker's gender have also been found in several studies, as well [5,14] .…”

Validating Models of Clinical Word Recognition Tests for Spanish/English Bilinguals

“…6 (NU-6) word recognition test (Tillman & Carhart, 1966). The Spanish material included Lists A, B, and D of the Spanish bisyllabic word recognition test (Weisleder & Hodgson, 1989). The tests were recorded by two different male native speakers and made commercially available by Auditec.…”

“…The psychometric function for the Spanish bisyllabic word recognition test has only been established in quiet (Flores & Aoyama, 2008;Weisleder & Hodgson, 1989); therefore, a direct comparison to the NU-6 test in noise is not possible. Some inference nonetheless could be drawn from data in quiet.…”

“…Existing evidence suggests a small but significant dialectal effect on the Spanish bisyllabic word recognition test performance (Shi & Canizales, 2013;Weisleder & Hodgson, 1989). For example, Shi and Canizales (2013) found that Caribbean dialect speakers tended to score lower on a Spanish word recognition test than the Highland dialect speakers whether or not their dominant language was Spanish or English.…”