Development of a Lexical-Semantic Test in Adults with Severe & Profound Hearing loss and Determining its Reliability and Validity

Semantics is one of the most important aspects of language acquisition the development of which maybe deviated in severe and profound hearing-impaired. The more words Deaf learned, the better they can communicate with their audience and understand the correct meaning of spoken and written messages of others. This study reports on the development of a lexical-semantic test and investigates its validity and reliability in adults with severe to profound hearing loss.

For the development of the test, a list of high frequency words including 120 words appropriate for literate adults was gathered. Then each word was placed in a sentence context for the purpose of contextualization. Afterwards, some choices were selected according to Haladyna rules. Content validity was assessed according to experts’ ratings and finally 44 questions remained. The test was administered to 35 participants (19 females and 16 males) with severe to profound hearing loss with school diploma, upper diploma and Bachelor of Science, while a group of 35 participants with normal hearing was considered as the control group.

The overall average of content validity ratio and index were obtained respectively +1 and 0.923. Cronbach's alpha value was equal to 0.918. In correlation between test-retest scores, there was a positive significant correlation between the scores (r=0.893, p<0.001). Hearing impaired girls’ mean score in comparison with boys’ was significantly higher (p<0.001). There were significant differences in the different educational levels (p= 0.032).

The test enjoyed high reliability and validity indices. The mean score of the girls was more than that of the boys. The higher the level of education of hearing impaired persons, the higher their performance on the lexical-semantic test.