Development and Assessment of Dichotic Digit Test in Persian Speaking Children

Speech is the most important part of human's communication. Auditory reception of speech facilitates normal language acquisition and cognitive development. Therefore, precise and early evaluation of speech perception ability in children is highly important. Since the performance of speech recognition test needs word lists with equal difficulty, the present study was designed to compare word recognition score of monosyllabic word lists in 7-9 years Persian speaking children with normal hearing.
The currentcross-sectional analytic study was performed on 113 Persian speaking children aged 7 to 9 years with normal hearing. After confirming that all participants had normal hearing using pure-tone and immittance audiometry, pictured word recognition score test was performed using four children’s monosyllabic pictured word lists. Descriptive and analytical statistical methods (ANCOVA) were used to analyze the data.
The results indicated no significant differences between the mean scores of the four lists in each age group (Pv=0.073). The mean scores of all lists were between 88%-96%. Also, a significant relationship was observed between increased age and increased score of the four lists. (Pv The results showed that the scores of all lists were within the normal range. Since there were no significant differences between list's scores in all age groups, it could be concluded that all the lists were of the same difficulty. Scores of 88% and above at most comfortable level are within the normal range.