A Picture Identification Test for Hearing-Impaired Children

Abstract

A picture identification test for measuring speech discrimination ability in hearing-impaired children was developed in two phases. In the first phase the word stimuli were evaluated to determine whether they were within the recognition vocabulary of the children and whether the pictorial representations of the words were adequate. Before the second phase, the test was revised to consist of 25 plates with 6 pictures on each plate, with only 4 of the pictures on each plate used as test stimuli. These 4 lists were given to 61 hearing-impaired children on two separate occasions. The results indicate reliability coefficients in excess of 0.87 for all four lists, with mean differences of less than 3% and correlation coefficients between lists greater than 0.84. The test appears to be a potentially valuable clinical tool in pediatric audiology. We call it the Word Intelligibility by Picture Identification test (WIPI).