Some Questions about Speech Audiometry

Abstract

A number of test batteries for speech audiometry were reviewed from the viewpoints of reliability and validity. Included in this review were the following: (1) CID Auditory Test No. I (36 spondees for SRT) (Hirsch et al. 1952), (2) CID Auditory Test No. 22 (PB-50 monosyllabic words) (Hirsch et aI. 1952), (3) NU Auditory Tests (TilIman et al. 1963, TilIman and Carhart 1966), (4) Multiple Choice Discrimination Test (MCDT) (Schultz and Schubert 1969), (5) The Rhyme Tests (Fairbanks 1958, House et al. 1963, 1965, Griffiths 1967), (6) The K.S.U. Speech Discrimination Test (Berger 1969), (7) The University of Oklahoma Closed-Response Speech Test (OUCRT) (Pederson and Studebaker 1972), (8) The California Consonant Test (CCT) (Owens and Schubert 1977), (9) The Synthetic Sentence Identification (SSI) (Speaks and Jerger 1965, Jerger, Speaks, and Trammel 1968), and (10) The Speech Perception in Noise Test (SPIN Test) (Kalikow, Stevens, and Elliot 1977). It was concluded that the audiological test materials for speech are reliable in the sense that the test results we obtain from them are numerically consistent. The consistencies, however, become meaningless when an attempt is made to interpret them in terms of speech segments (i.e., phonemes and allophones) and rulegoverned linguistic structures of English. They are disappointingly devoid of validity.