Spoken Language Assessment in Children with Hearing Impairment: Standardized Tests and Hearing Age

Many children with hearing impairment who use oral language (CHI) have a linguistic development that lags behind that of children with typical development (CTD). The assessment of their linguistic abilities is crucial in order to stimulate their development. The use of standardized tests, while useful for measuring differences between the level of linguistic development of CHI and the typical development expected for their age, can show a floor effect in CHI due to the discrepancy between their hearing experience and their age. This work aimed to analyze whether standard scores calculated with hearing age instead of chronological age can provide more precise information on the linguistic abilities of CHI. Fifty-six Spanish-speaking CHI were administered the Peabody receptive vocabulary test. Floor effects were significantly less frequent in standard scores calculated with hearing age. Also, a significant difference was observed between the CHI's chronological age and their equivalent age (i.e., the age their level of vocabulary corresponds to), with a mean difference of over three years, but not between their equivalent age and their hearing age, with a mean difference of four months. These results suggest that examining standard scores calculated with hearing age might provide more precise information regarding the level of linguistic development of CHI than standard scores calculated with chronological age and, thus, might be a good complement in assessment. Moreover, the results underlie the advantage of assessment tools that provide scales of children's level of development in a certain ability, independently of their chronological age.