Assessing Speech Perception in Children

Author: Karen I. Kirk, Allen O. Diefendorf, David B. Pisoni and Amy M. Robbins

Abstract:
This chapter examines the assessment of speech perception abilities in children, with special emphasis o assessment in children with hearing loss. In the first section, a number of behavioral measures are discussed that are commonly used in clinical practice and that can be used to assess a hierarchy of skills in children with both normal hearing and with varying degrees of hearing loss. The second section considers the special case of assessing speech perception performance in children with cochlear implants and describes several assessment batteries that have been developed for use with this population Finally, several new directions for assessment of speech perception performance in children are examined, including new measures specifically designed to examine the encoding, storage, and retrieval of spoken words from long-term lexical memory by children with hearing loss.