Study of normative values for competing speech tests with school aged francophone children

Goal: The project aimed at a study of the normative values of two speech tests adapted to French: A dichotic listening test with words and a test of listening to competing sentences with a story. Methodology: Forty four and 45 children without hearing problems from six to eleven years of age, divided into five groups according to age, were submitted to two speech tests adapted to French: the Synthetic Sentence Identification -Ipsilateral Competing Message (SSI-ICM) and the Staggered Spondaic Word (SSW). The performance of the children in the tests was compared to those of the 68 children in the Berard Study (1990-1993). Results: For the SSI-ICM, the results showed a significant difference between the performances of the children of the two groups only for the signal/noise ratio of 0 dB. The results of the statistical analyses with regards to the SSW revealed no significant difference between the children of the two groups. However, they showed a significant difference between the performances of younger and older children. Furthermore, generally, the number of errors was significantly higher in listening conditions where the words were presented at the same time as opposed to when the words were not competing. Conclusion: Normative values were calculated for both tests based on the data from both groups of children. The present study contributes to the establishment of norms in a greater selection of children for these two tests adapted to French.