Scoring Spanish word-recognition measures

Spanish word recognition scores were determined from 10 native Spanish-speaking listeners' written and oral responses to four Auditec lists (A, B, C, and D) of two-syllable Spanish words. An analysis of variance revealed that the word recognition scores derived from the oral responses were the same when scored by 15 native English-speaking judges with a knowledge of Spanish and when scored by 15 native English-speaking judges without a knowledge of Spanish (p > 0.01). To evaluate the accuracy with which these two groups of judges scored the oral responses, the absolute values of the numeric differences between the word recognition scores derived from the oral and written responses were determined. An analysis of variance of these absolute difference scores revealed a significant main effect of judges' knowledge of Spanish (p < .01). Although the difference between the groups of judges was statistically significant, this difference is of little clinical significance. The word recognition scores for written and oral responses differed on average by two percentage points when oral responses were scored by judges with a knowledge of Spanish and by three percentage points when oral responses were scored by the group without a knowledge of Spanish. These data indicate that English-speaking audiologists are competent to judge the accuracy of Spanish-speaking listeners' oral responses to Spanish word recognition measures.