German Oldenburg Sentence Test for Children: a useful speech audiometry tool for hearing-impaired children at kindergarten and school age.

BACKGROUND/AIMS: In speech audiometry, sentence tests have the advantage of assessing more words within a given period of time than single-word tests do. Consequently, greater accuracy (steeper discrimination function) is achieved. The recently developed German Oldenburg Sentence Test for Children (OlKiSa) has been evaluated thus far for school-aged children in noise, and normative data for younger children in a quiet environment have been established. In this study, the focus is on its applicability in hearing-impaired children fitted with hearing aids or cochlear implants.

METHODS

The use of the OlKiSa in a quiet environment in hearing-impaired children aged 4 years or older was evaluated. One hundred and nineteen hearing-impaired children aged between 4 and 10 years performed the OlKiSa in a quiet environment. Individual speech reception thresholds (SRT) were measured aided and unaided and the slopes of the discrimination functions were calculated.

RESULTS

Independent of age, the mean slope of the discrimination function for SRT was about 7%/dB in both conditions, which is a high value of steepness for a speech audiometric test in a quiet environment.

CONCLUSION

The OlKiSa in quiet is a reliable test procedure for hearing-impaired children aged 4 years and older.