Relative efficiency of warbled-tone and conventional pure-tone testing with children

Thirty-four normal-hearing 4-year-old children were tested with conventional steady-state pure tones and with warbled tones to compare efficiency of the stimuli. Three measures of efficiency were used: (1) amount of time to train a child to perform the experimental task; (2) amount of time required to obtain thresholds; and (3) number of ascents used for obtaining thresholds. The strong implication by the literature that warbled tones would result in greater clinical efficiency was not supported by the comparisons of the experimental measures. It was concluded that convincing evidence to persuade the audiologist to select warbled over conventional steady-state pure tones for testing children was lacking.