Abstract

Speech perception is the process of transforming a continuously changing acoustic signal into discrete linguistic units and is a developmental process having several aspects i.e. Pattern perception, Perception of phonemic contrasts, Vowel & Sentence perception. There is no standardized minimal pair test material available for testing Hindi school aged children and no normative data for this test is available in Indian scenario. Such normative data will act as a reference for using of Hindi Minimal Pair Test (HMPT) test with children with hearing impairment in clinical situation. Hence, this study is warranted. The aim of study is to obtain normative data for school aged children on HMPT of speech perception. A total of 200 participants were included in the study. Each subject underwent Otoscopic examination, Oto Acoustic Emission, Pure tone audiometry, Immittance audiometry and Screening for CAPD. This study indicates perception of minimal pair contrast significantly improves as the age increases. P value obtained for comparison between males and females is 0.62 which is greater than 0.05 suggesting no significant difference between mean scores of male and female participants. For age comparison obtained p value is 0.00, suggesting a significant difference between the two age groups. P value of 0.051 for interaction suggests no significant interaction between age and sexstatistically.

Keywords

speech perception, auditory discrimination, audiometry, immittance, hindi minimal pair test, oto acoustic emission, screening for central auditory processing disorder