The new Mainz speech test for children 3-7 years old (MATCH) : Design, standardization, and validation.

Objective: To develop a new, German, age-appropriate speech audiometry test for children, by using 26 nouns that are most likely part of the lexicon of 2-year-olds. The test is a picture-pointing task with a four-option non-forced choice method.

Materials And Methods: In total, 179 children aged 2;11 to 6;9 y were included for standardizing and validating the speech test. Of these, 51 had a hearing impairment in both ears ranging up to 90 dB hearing level (HL). The normal-hearing collective was divided into three groups according to age. For each group, the speech reception threshold (SRT) and the slope of the psychometric function of intelligibility were determined. For validation, the test-retest reliability was measured in 85 ears, and the correlation between the pure tone average (PTA) at 0.5, 1, 2, and 4 kHz and the SRT was measured in 86 ears.

Results: The sound spectrum of the 26 items was in good accordance with the international long-term speech spectrum, and the relative frequency of phonemes matched the distribution of the 50 more frequent German phonemes. The SRTs ranged from 24.6 ± 0.6 dB sound pressure level (SPL) for the oldest group (> 5.5 y) to 29.3 ± 1.3 dB SPL for the youngest group (< 4.25 y). The slopes of the psychometric function ranged from 4.3 ± 0.5%/dB for the oldest group to 2.6 ± 0.4%/dB for the youngest. The test and retest showed good correlation (r  = 0.89, p < 0.0001) as did the PTA and SRT (r = 0.84, p < 0.0001).

Conclusion: The newly developed Mainz speech-test effectively measures age-related speech perception from the age of three years.