Speech Perception Tests: Talkers and Listeners

Children must be able to hear the speech of others, as well as their own, to develop spoken language. For young children with hearing impairments, there is a mismatch between the type of talker most commonly used in clinical speech tests and the type(s) of talker(s) most commonly heard in everyday situations. Although young children are exposed primarily to adult females' and children’s speech (including their own), many clinical tests consist of speech materials recorded by adult males. Since speech acoustics vary significantly with gender and age of the talker, the results of clinical speech tests may be a poor estimate of a hearing impaired children’s actual speech understanding in everyday situations. These issues may have clinical implications for the evaluation and fitting of hearing aids, and programming of cochlear implants.