Hearing-impaired children's performance on the Edgerton and Danhauer Nonsense Syllable Test

The monaural performance of 7 girls, aged 8:8-14:8 yrs, with mild-to-moderate hearing losses, was assessed at SLs of 25, 35, 45, and 55 db on List A of a commercially available taped version (Auditec of St. Louis) of the Edgerton and Danhauer (1979) nonsense syllable test (NST). Ss' verbal responses were transcribed phonetically and scored by phoneme, consonant, vowel, and bisyllabic methods. The phoneme method was preferred. There were no age effects. Performance improved slightly as SL increased. Results were favorably compared to those of earlier studies on this and other versions of the NST; these preliminary data indicate that the NST is useful for assessing children's phoneme perception.