AUDITORY PERCEPTION TEST FOR MILD TO PROFOUND HEARING-IMPAIRED INDIVIDUALS(5-20 YEARS) IN BAGHCHE-BAN DEAF SCHOOL IN KARAJ(2002)

Nowadays it is known that doing pure tone audiometry just gives us some information about the degree and the type of hearing loss. Therefore a question is posed: How does a man use his hearing for speech perception and what is the necessity of using auditory perception tests? This research was a developmental study which was done in two stages: the first stage included modifying the items and the second stage was their evaluation. Our sampling was mainly on the basis of test and evaluation. At first, Allen G. Serwatka criterion for designing the test items was considered. In modifying the orginal APT/HI, care was taken to include Persian items which provided information on Persian phonemes, phonetics and sentence structure as well as active vocabulary of mild to profound hearing-impaired people which was presented through pictorial images. In order to prepare test items, we took full advantage of a number of speech and language pathologists’ points of view. Also, to determine content validity, test items were reviewed by 5 audiologists working in the field of Rehabilitative Audiology. To assess test validity and reliability, 60 hearing-impaired students from Baghcheban Deaf School in Karaj were selected and tested. The tests included otoscopy, puretone and immitance audiometry, auditory perception test-retest, and closed-set speech recognition test. After analysing data an accepted content validity was obtained(88.4%). Significant difference was observed between test scores and hearing loss(P<0.05). Significant difference was obtained in scores of 7 to 11-year-old students and 15 to 17-year-old ones, when hearing loss was over 70 dBHL(P<0.05). But no significant difference was obtained between scores of 12 to 14-year-old and 15 to 17-year-old students(P>0.05). Additionally, significant correlation was observed between APT/HL scores and closed-set speech recognition scores(P<0.05). Significant correlation was observed in test-retest scores(P<0.05). Based on the obtained results, this study is reliable, the items have good content validity and criterion validity is high between this test and closed-set speech recognition test. Therefore, this test is useful for auditory rehabilitation centers.