SCREENING WITH AAST IN 6-7 YEAR OLD CHILDREN IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS IN POLAND

Coninx F (1), Senderski A (2), Kochanek K (2), Lorens A (2) Skarzynski H.(2)

(1) Institut für Audiopädagogik, at the Univ. of Cologne, Germany; (2) International Center for Hearing and Speech, Kajetany/Warsaw, Poland.

Research question: When children are entering primary school a screening procedure for hearing is extremely important. Hearing plays an essential role in communication and instruction in the classroom and particularly in developing phonological and phonemic awareness as a basis for the development of reading and writing.

The question was raised whether the traditional golden standard of “pure tone audiometry” might be (partly) replaced and/or extended with a speech based hearing screening procedure.

In the present study, the use of AAST (Adaptive Auditory Speech Test) is tested and evaluated.

One special point of interest was the possibility to identify not only children with a peripheral hearing loss but also those with disorders at the level of auditory processing (APD).

Method:  The auditory speech test AAST (Coninx 2006) – measures the Speech Recognition Threshold (SRT) in quiet and in noise. By that, it includes relevant conditions reflecting daily life situations of the child, particularly also for the noisy school environment.

AAST is constructed to be a global speech test, i.e. including not only analytical (bottom-up) but also global (top-down) processes. The AAST has been constructed with special focus on young children: an interactive PC-task, automatized adaptive procedure, using a closed set of only 6 spondee words. Standard testing time is 2 minutes; in the screening version this has been reduced to 1 minute per ear.

Results: In a screening program in eastern Poland N=120.000 children were screened with pure tone audiometry. In a subgroup of about 14.000 children also AAST-Screening was implemented. For these children AAST and pure tone audiometry data were compared, showing high correlation. The results of AAST and pure tone audiometry were also compared with the data from audiological questionnaire.

E-mail: a.senderski@ifps.org.pl