Testing Non-Native Speakers

Question 1

Why is it important that audiologists consider testing non-native english speakers?

Answer 1

Need to be able to accurately assess speech understanding

As society continues to diversify and our patient population expands to include non-native English speakers and individuals without any spoken English, it is important for the audiologist to consider making modifications for the audiological evaluation and rehabilitation of these individuals

Question 2

How does the language issue influence performance?

Answer 2

Language knowledge has been shown to affect the patient’s scores on speech testing.

a. Weisleder & Hodgson (1989) found that when materials are not in a patient’s native language, their scores are erroneously lower because they are hearing nonsense stimuli as opposed to words

b. Furthermore, the patient’s age of acquisition of English and their proficiency in English has been shown to affect their performance.
i. Mayo et al found that when comparing individuals learning English before and after puberty, performance on a sentence level test was equal in quiet but those who acquire English before puberty have better performance in noise (Mayo et al., 1997).

Question 3

What issues are involved in selecting appropriate tests?

Answer 3

• Lack of availability of materials in other languages
• Audiologists familiarity with the stimuli–> It’s a non-issue b/c Cokely & Yaker (1993) showed that scores remain accurate
• Patient’s word familiarity b/c stimuli are nonsense stimuli if don’t know the language (Weisleder & Hodgson, 1989)

Question 4

Should non-sense syllables be used?

Answer 4

• Avoid non-sense syllables (Danhauer et al., 1984)
• When stimuli are unfamiliar, results are not an accurate reflection of speech understanding ability (Zubic et al., 1983)
• When non-sense syllable test with English phonemes was administered to Spanish speakers, performance was poorer for non-native speakers compared to English speaking and bilingual speakers (Danhauer et al., 1984)

Question 5

What are the recommended strategies to evaluate these patients?

Answer 5

• Digit pairs for SRT (Ramkissoon et al., 2002)
• SAT instead of an SRT to use as a cross-check measure between speech and pure tones
• Bisyllabic instead of monosyllabic words for Spanish speakers (Weisleder & Hodgson, 1989)
• Closed-set picture pointing test for WR
• Basic non-native English lexicon test proposed since not linguistically biased (Calandruccio & Smiljanic, 2012)
• Recorded stimuli