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Original Article

Development of an auditory test battery for young children: a pilot study

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Pages 330-338 | Received 21 Jan 2003, Accepted 04 Jul 2003, Published online: 07 Jul 2009
 

Abstract

This article describes the development and results of a pilot study with a recently developed auditory test battery for 4-6-year-old Dutch children. The test battery consisted of a sustained auditory attention (SAA) test, a dichotic words (DW) test, a binaural masking-level difference (BMLD) test, an auditory word discrimination (AWD) test, a gap detection (GD) test and a test of phonemic awareness, the Lindamood Auditory Conceptualization (LAC) test. Our results show that this test battery can be administered successfully to children aged 4 years and older. Most tests showed a clear effect of chronological age; the strongest age effects were found for the DW test and the LAC test. The BMLD test was the only test for which no significant age effect was found in this group of children. A small, but significant right-ear advantage was found on the DW test, for the 4- and the 6-year-olds. Correlations between subtests were in general rather high, suggesting that several tests in this test battery may be tapping into similar auditory abilities.

Sumario

Este arti´culo describe el desarrollo y los resultados de un estudio piloto reciente sobre una bateri´a de pruebas auditivas para nin˜os holandeses de 4 a 6 an˜os. La bateri´a esta´ conformada por las siguientes pruebas: atencio´n auditiva sostenida (SAA), palabras dico´ticas (DW), diferencia binaural del nivel de enmascaramiento (BMLD), discriminacio´n auditiva de palabras (AWD), prueba de cierre auditivo (GD) y la prueba de conciencia fone´mica, la prueba de conceptualizacio´n auditiva de Lindamood (LAC). Nuestros resultados demuestran que esta bateri´a puede ser aplicada con e´xito a nin˜os de 4 an˜os de edad y mayores. La mayori´a de las pruebas mostraron un claro efecto de la edad cronolo´gica siendo ma´s notorios los encontrados en la prueba DW y en la prueba LAC. La u´nica prueba en la que no se demostro´ un efecto de la edad fue en la BMLD. Se encontro´ un efecto pequen˜o pero significativo del oi´do derecho en la prueba DW en los nin˜os de 4 a 6 an˜os. La correlacio´n entre las pruebas fue en general elevada, lo que sugiere que varias de las pruebas de esta bateri´a pueden estar explorando habilidades auditivas similares.

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