Development of a central auditory test battery for adults

There is little standardized test material in Dutch to document central auditory processing disorders (CAPDs). Therefore, a new central auditory test battery was composed and standardized for use with adult populations and older children. The test battery comprised seven tests (words in noise, filtered speech, binaural fusion, sentences in noise, dichotic digits, frequency and duration patterns, backward masking) and a questionnaire. Descriptive statistics obtained from 28 Dutch adults with normal hearing are presented. Eleven of the subjects were retested. The test-retest results showed that the variability between subjects was not due to systematic effects. Except for the backward masking test, the results were comparable with data from other studies. As most test scores did not follow a normal distribution, cut-off scores are recommended to evaluate individual subjects. Experiments on subjects with suspected CAPDs are in progress to validate the test battery and to see whether the number of tests can be reduced.