[Evaluation of the Oldenburg children's rhyme test in silence and in noise]

Abstract

Background: The Oldenburg children's rhyme test (OlKi) was designed and optimized for speech intelligibility measurements for primary school pupils in silence [8, 3]. In the optimization, the intelligibility of the particular test words was equalized.

Methods: The evaluation of the test with 147 primary school pupils with normal hearing in silence and 107 pupils in noise is presented in this article. The comparability between test lists for speech intelligibility was investigated and age dependent reference functions were determined.

Results: The evaluation showed that intelligibility differences are larger across children within one grade than across different test lists. The reference functions of first grade pupils are shifted to slightly higher presentation levels and signal-to-noise ratios both in silence and noise.

Conclusions: The 12 optimized test lists of the OlKi test are equally intelligible both in silence and noise. No list effects are expected. The degree of difficulty of the Oldenburg children's rhyme test can be compared with the Göttingen children's test II and the Mainz children's test III.