Auditory and Visual Hearing Test Software

Profound increases in the ethnic composition of the United States have resulted in a growing demand for hearing test materials appropriate for children and adults who are not native English speakers. Auditory/visual word-identification materials are uniquely suited to this purpose since they may be administered and scored by audiologists who do not speak the patient's language. The purpose is to explore the feasibility of a commercial software product containing auditory/visual word-identification materials. The initial software package will be aimed towards Spanish-speaking individuals (Phase I) and is intended to serve as a prototype for software containing materials in many common languages (Phase II) that could be made available to all hearing specialists. In Phase I, the computer-based storage and administrative formats for the auditory and visual portions of the test materials will be developed and refined. Once the appropriate formats have been finalized, normative performance data in the form of auditory psychometric functions will be obtained using Spanish speakers as subjects. A successful computer-based approach for speech acuity tests involving a simple language-to-place transformation on a computer monitor is a major technological innovation over the traditional paper-and-plastic medium.