Author: Melissa Kluck, David B. Pisoni and Karen Iler Kirk

Abstract:
The Phonetically Balanced Kindergarten Test (PBK), an open-set test of word recognition is typically included in test batteries designed to assess the speech perception skills of profoundly deaf children with cochlear implants. Many pediatric cochlear implant users have a great deal of difficulty with this test. Two new open set tests, the Lexical Neighborhood Test (LNT), and Multisyllabic Lexical Neighborhood Test (MLNT) (Kirk, Pisoni & Osberger, 1995), have been developed with the framework of the Neighborhood Activation Model (NAM) (Luce, 1986) of spoken word recognition. The LNT and MLNT are based on the lexical characteristics of word frequency and neighborhood density, and include words found in the vocabularies of children age three to five. Results from these tests with pediatric cochlear implant users have shown that their lexicons appear to be organized into similarity neighborhoods, and these neighborhoods are accessed in open-set word recognition tests. The present study investigates the speech perception abilities of normal hearing children ages three and four using the PBK, LNT and MLNT. The study was also designed to assess test-retest reliability for these tests using normal hearing children. Each child was first screened to ensure normal hearing, and measures of each childıs vocabularies were obtained. Normal hearing three and four year old children performed extremely well, with scores near ceiling on all three tests. Because of the lack of variance in the scores, test-retest reliability could not be assessed using this population. The study did demonstrate, however, that it is reasonable to expect normal hearing three- and four-year old children to recognize all the words from these three open-set speech perception tests at very high levels of performance. These results can be used as a benchmark for children with hearing impairments who score poorly on the PBK, LNT and MLNT.