[The new Mainz speech test for children aged 3-7 years (MATCH) : Design, standardization, and validation. German...

A new German speech audiometry test was developed using 26 nouns that are most likely part of the lexicon of 2‑year-old children. The test was a picture-pointing task using a four-alternative non-forced choice method.

In total, 179 children aged 2 years 11 months to 6 years 9 months were included to standardize and validate the speech test. Of these children, 51 had a hearing impairment in both ears ranging up to 90 dB hearing level. The normal-hearing collective was divided into three groups according to age. For each group, the speech reception threshold (SRT) and the slope of the psychometric function of intelligibility were determined. For validation, the test-retest reliability was measured in 85 ears and the correlation between the pure-tone average (PTA) at 0.5, 1, 2, and 4 kHz and the SRT was determined in 86 ears.

The sound spectrum of the 26 items was in good accordance with the international long-term speech spectrum and with the distribution of the 50 most frequent German phonemes. The SRT ranged from 24.6 ± 0.6 dB sound pressure level (SPL) for the oldest group (>5.5 years) to 29.3 ± 1.3 dB SPL for the youngest group (<4.25 years). The slopes of the psychometric function ranged from 4.3 ± 0.5%/dB for the oldest group to 2.6 ± 0.4%/dB for the youngest group. The test and retest showed good correlation (r = 0.89, p < 0.0001), as did the PTA and SRT (r = 0.84, p < 0.0001).

The newly developed test effectively measures age-related speech perception from the age of 2 years 11 months.