A comparative evaluation of children's auditory discrimination tests

Five commonly used children's tests of auditory discrimination were administered to thirty normal hearing six year old children. The following tests were used: Goldman-Fristoe-Woodcock Test of Auditory Discrimination (GFWTAD), Wepman Auditory Discrimination Test (WADT), Boston University Speech Sound Discrimination Picture Test (Boston), Discrimination by Identification of Pictures (DIP), and the Phonetically Balanced Kindergarten Lists (PBK). These tests are assumed to all be testing auditory discrimination; however, each test has a number of variables such as: guessing factor resulting from the number of pictures presented as visual-stimuli, discrimination of sounds based on “same” and “different” concepts versus picture identification techniques, understanding of the task, and familiarity with the vocabulary. Each child was administered a pure tone air conduction screening test with tympanograms and/or bone conduction testing to eliminate those children having conductive components.It appeared that no correlation existed between the tests and that when testing for intercorrelation between the tests, several test pairs were inversely related. Results of the tests indicated that there was essentially no difference between the scores of male subjects and the scores of female subjects. The effect of order of presentation revealed a negative correlation on the WADT and the Boston, with no effect on the DIP or GFWTAD.The implications of this investigation was that further study may be necessary since very little research has been performed in this area.Thesis (M.A.