German Oldenburg Sentence Test for Children: a useful speech audiometry tool for hearing-impaired children at kindergarten and school age.

BACKGROUND/AIMS: In speech audiometry, sentence tests have the advantage of assessing more words within a given period of time than single-word tests do. Consequently, greater accuracy (steeper discrimination function) is achieved. The recently developed German Oldenburg Sentence Test for Children (OlKiSa) has been evaluated thus far for school-aged children in noise, and normative data for younger children in a quiet environment have been established. In this study, the focus is on its applicability in hearing-impaired children fitted with hearing aids or cochlear implants.
METHODS: The use of the OlKiSa in a quiet environment in hearing-impaired children aged 4 years or older was evaluated. One hundred and nineteen hearing-impaired children aged between 4 and 10 years performed the OlKiSa in a quiet environment. Individual speech reception thresholds (SRT) were measured aided and unaided and the slopes of the discrimination functions were calculated.
RESULTS: Independent of age, the mean slope of the discrimination function for SRT was about 7%/dB in both conditions, which is a high value of steepness for a speech audiometric test in a quiet environment.
CONCLUSION: The OlKiSa in quiet is a reliable test procedure for hearing-impaired children aged 4 years and older.