Pediatric speech audiometry in noise: validation of the Italian simplifed matrix test with children

Speech intelligibility measurements in noise were conducted with children aged from 5 to 10 years divided in 3 age groups. In each age group children with different hearing status (normal-hearing, hearing-impaired with mild, moderate and severe hearing loss) were involved. After one training list of 14 speech phases presented at a fixed signal-to-ratio, speech intelligibility was measured adaptively at 80% speech reception threshold (SRT80). In all measurement speech-shaped noise was used as a masker. In addition to the speech audiometry in noise, all hearing-impaired children underwent otomicroscopy, pure tone and immitance audiometry. Results: Considering normal-hearing children, no statistical differences in SRT80 were found between children in age of 7 to 10 years old. The youngest group showed significantly higher (worse) thresholds than older groups. High test-retest reliability of about 1.0 dB was observed for all age groups. Hearing-impaired children performed worse than the children with normal hearing. Test sensitivity and specificity will be reported as well as correlation between pure tone audiometry and speech in noise thresholds. Conclusion: The simplified Italian Matrix test was shown to be an accurate and sensitive tool for diagnostics of hearing impairment in children. The Italian test is also compatible with the tests in other languages what increases the comparability of speech audiometry in children across different countries.