British children’s performance on the listening in spatialised noise-sentences test (LISN-S)

Abstract

Objective: To investigate whether British children’s performance is equivalent to North American norms on the listening in spatialised noise-sentences test (LiSN-S).

Design: Prospective study comparing the performance of a single British group of children to North-American norms on the LiSN-S (North American version).

Study sample: The British group was composed of 46 typically developing children, aged 6–11 years 11 months, from a mainstream primary school in London.

Results: No significant difference was observed between the British’s group performance and the North-American norms for Low-cue, High-cue, Spatial Advantage and Total Advantage measure. The British group presented a significantly lower performance only for Talker Advantage measure (z-score: 0.35, 95% confidence interval −0.12 to −0.59). Age was significantly correlated with all unstandardised measures.

Conclusion: Our results indicate that, when assessing British children, it would be appropriate to add a corrective factor of 0.35 to the z-score value obtained for the Talker Advantage in order to compare it to the North-American norms. This strategy would enable the use of LiSN-S in the UK to assess auditory stream segregation based on spatial cues.

Keywords:

• Spatial processing disorder
• auditory stream segregation
• children
• auditory processing

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgements

Harvey Dillon acknowledges the support of the Australian Department of Health, Macquarie University and the NIHR Manchester Biomedical Research Centre.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.