Development and Validation of Phonetically Balanced Speech Perception Test in Urdu Language

Purpose: The tool of speech or language assessment is required to be linguistically and culturally appropriate for the individual being tested. Testing in native language is essential if an audiologist or speech and language therapist wants to test the speech perception capacities of an individual and to use the data for further planning and monitoring of the therapeutic efforts. Numerous speech perception tests are available in different international and regional languages. But in Urdu language, no such tool is available to the clinicians to check the speech perception abilities of hearing impaired individuals. Therefore, this study was designed to: (1) estimating the frequency of occurrence of Urdu consonants; (2) developing a speech perception test in Urdu Language for children with hearing impairment; and (3) establishing the reliability and validity of the test. Methods: This study was carried out in three stages. In stage I, structural attributes of the test were planned. During stage II, firstly mean phonetic occurrence of each consonant in Urdu language was calculated. Secondly, a pool of most common image-able Urdu words was generated from which a 25 word-list for identification task was created. Finally, the speech perception test was finalized after establishing its content validity. In stage III, reliability and validity of the test was established through a pilot study conducted via randomly selected 100 normally hearing and 30 hearing impaired subjects. Results: The Urdu speech perception test is a non-verbal, norm referenced test. Content, predictive and construct validity was established. Split half reliability of the test was 0.798 and test-retest reliability was 0.881 which was found to be significant at α = 0.05 and α = 0.01 level of significance respectively. Inter-scorer reliability was 0.598 which was significant at α = 0.10 level. Conclusions: The Urdu speech perception test is a reliable, validated and linguistically appropriate non verbal tool to check the speech perception abilities of children with hearing impairment.