[Effect of linguistic competence on speech audiometry results using the Basel Sentence Test]

Linguistic competence, such as a mental lexicon knowledge of syntactic rules of the language and the use of semantic constraints, may impact central speech processing and play an important role in speech recognition. The influence of linguistic ability on speech understanding was investigated using the Basel Sentence Understanding Test. The subject's linguistic ability was determined based upon educational background (elementary school, high school and or university) and intelligence quotients (IQ) based on the reduced version of the Hamburg-Wechsler Intelligence Test. Forty normally-hearing subjects listened to five test forms of the Basel Sentence Understanding Test. Each test form comprised a fraction of 15 low-predictable (LP) test items and 15 high-predictable (HP) test items based on the amount of contextual information in the phrases. No effect of educational background and IQ-value could be demonstrated on the scores of LP sentences. However, there was a small but significant influence of educational background and IQ-value on the scores of HP sentences. The implications of these findings on clinical speech audiometry are discussed.