Assessing speech perception in Swedish school-aged children: preliminary data on the Listen-Say test

To meet the need for a linguistic speech perception test in Swedish, the 'Listen-Say test' was developed. Minimal word pairs were used as speech material to assess seven phonetic contrasts in two auditory backgrounds. In the present study, children's speech discrimination skills in quiet and in four-talker (4T) speech background were examined. Associations with lexical-access skills and academic achievement were explored. The study included 27 school children 7-9 years of age. Overall, the children discriminated phonetic contrasts well in both conditions (quiet: Mdn 95%; 4T speech; Mdn 91% correct). A significant effect of 4T speech background was evident in three of the contrasts, connected to place of articulation, voicing and syllable complexity. Reaction times for correctly identified target words were significantly longer in the quiet condition, possibly reflecting a need for further balancing of the test order. Overall speech discrimination accuracy was moderately to highly correlated with lexical-access ability. Children identified as having high concentration ability by their teacher had the highest speech discrimination scores in both conditions followed by children identified as having high reading ability. The first wave of data collection with the Listen-Say test indicates that the test appears to be sensitive to predicted perceptual difficulties of phonetic contrasts particularly in noise. The clinical benefit of using a procedure where speech discrimination, lexical-access ability and academic achievement are taken into account is discussed as well as issues for further test refinement.