Proceedings Fonetik 2009 - Institutionen för lingvistik

Proceedings, FONETIK 2009, Dept. of Linguistics, Stockholm University• what order of difficulty of stimulus presentationis appropriate• what are familiar words for children atdifferent ages and with different hearinglosses• what is the most unambiguous way toillustrate the chosen test wordsMoreover, the task had to be meaningful, naturaland well understood by the child; otherwisehe/she will not cooperate. Finally, the test mustrapidly give a reliable result, as small childrendo not have particularly good attention and motivation.The child answers by pointing with the mouseor with his/her finger to one of the boxes on thescreen. The results are presented in percent correctresponses on each subtest showing a profileof a child’s functional hearing, see figure 2(Öster, 2008)Table 1. The eighteen subtests included in the test.Description of HöraTal-TestIn the development of this analytical speechperception test the above mentioned factorswere taken into consideration (Öster et al,2002).The words contain important phonologicalSwedish contrasts and each contrast is tested inone of eighteen different subtests by 6 wordpairs presented twice. In Table 1 a summary ofthe test shows the phonological contrasts evaluatedin each subtest, an explanation of the discriminationtask and one example from eachsubtest. The words used were recorded by onefemale speaker. An illustrated word (the target)is presented to the child on a computer screentogether with the female voice reading theword. The task of the child is to discriminatebetween two following sounds without illustrationsand to decide which one is the same as thetarget word, see figure 1.Figure 1. An example of the presentation of teststimuli on the computer screen. In this case thephonological contrast of vowels differing at lowfrequencies tested through the words båt-bot[bo:t­bu׃t] (boat-remedy).Figure 2. Example of a result profile for a child.Percent correct responses are shown for each subtest.97