Lexical Effects on Spoken Word Recognition in Children with Hearing Impairment: Test-Retest Reliability of the Persian Lexical Neighborhood Tests

The current study investigated lexical effects on the recognitionof spoken words in Persian-speaking children with hearing impairment usingPersian lexical neighborhood tests (PLNTs).

The research was administered as a cross-sectional study. PLNTswere performed on thirty-three pediatric hearing aid (HAs) or cochlear implant(CIs) users by sound field under spectrally degraded conditions. Thirteen 7-to-13-year-old (8 boys and 5 girls) participants completed the experiments, whichwere administered in a 3 × 4-m acoustic room using a sound field. The order ofthe tests in each session was from the lowest to the highest signal-to-noise ratios(SNRs), ranging from − 2 to 4 dB. The experiments were repeated by the sameexaminers under the same conditions two months later with nine of the thirteenparticipants.

Pediatric users of HAs or CIs could not optimally recognize spokenwords in noise, specifically when they had to recognize words through anauditory-only modality. There was a significant difference in the participants’SWR performance on the PMLNT-easy versus the PMLNT-hard and the PDLNTeasyversus the PDLNT-hard based on independent samples T test (P<0.001).There was a significant difference in the participants’ SWR performance on thePMLNT-easy versus the PDLNT-easy and the PMLNT-hard versus the PDLNThardbased on the independent samples T test as well (P<0.001). Accordingly,word lexical difficulty (easy/hard words) and word length (monosyllabic/disyllabic words) were the most fundamental factors having significant effectson the recognition of spoken words in children with HAs or CIs in the test/retest phases.

The PLNTs, as a valid assessment toolkit, can be reliably used tomeasure SWR performance under spectrally degraded conditions in Persianspeakingchildren with hearing impairment using HAs or CIs.