Lexical Effects on Spoken Word Recognition in Children with Hearing Impairment: Test-Retest Reliability of the Persian Lexical Neighborhood Tests

Abstract

Background: The current study investigated lexical effects on the recognitionof spoken words in Persian-speaking children with hearing impairment usingPersian lexical neighborhood tests (PLNTs).Methods: The research was administered as a cross-sectional study. PLNTswere performed on thirty-three pediatric hearing aid (HAs) or cochlear implant(CIs) users by sound field under spectrally degraded conditions. Thirteen 7-to-13-year-old (8 boys and 5 girls) participants completed the experiments, whichwere administered in a 3 × 4-m acoustic room using a sound field. The order ofthe tests in each session was from the lowest to the highest signal-to-noise ratios(SNRs), ranging from − 2 to 4 dB. The experiments were repeated by the sameexaminers under the same conditions two months later with nine of the thirteenparticipants.Results: Pediatric users of HAs or CIs could not optimally recognize spokenwords in noise, specifically when they had to recognize words through anauditory-only modality. There was a significant difference in the participants’SWR performance on the PMLNT-easy versus the PMLNT-hard and the PDLNTeasyversus the PDLNT-hard based on independent samples T test (p <0.001).There was a significant difference in the participants’ SWR performance on thePMLNT-easy versus the PDLNT-easy and the PMLNT-hard versus the PDLNThardbased on the independent samples T test as well (p <0.001). Accordingly,word lexical difficulty (easy/hard words) and word length (monosyllabic/disyllabic words) were the most fundamental factors having significant effectson the recognition of spoken words in children with HAs or CIs in the test/retest phases.Conclusion: The PLNTs, as a valid assessment toolkit, can be reliably used tomeasure SWR performance under spectrally degraded conditions in Persianspeakingchildren with hearing impairment using HAs or CIs.

Keywords

• persian lexical neighborhood tests
• spoken word recognition
• hearing loss
• cochlear implant
• children