The Preliminary Study for Development of Phoneme Perception Test Tool in the School-Aged Children

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to develop a test list for school-aged children that can evaluate consonant perception ability and verify the validity and difficulty. Methods: The test list consisted of 127 initial and 94 final consonant test items with meaningful one-syllable words and was developed in two types for each difficulty level. To verify the validity of the developed phoneme perception test tool, twenty children with normal hearing were tested for the validity of the results, and the contents were verified by experts in various fields. Results: As a result of comparing the rate of correct response according to the type of test item (initial vs. final consonant) and difficulty (easy vs. difficult item), the initial and easy responses were higher than the final and hard item, respectively, so the difficulty level of the test list was appropriate. In addition, there was no statistical difference in the rate of correct answers according to the test speakers, and the content validity analysis for experts verified that the developed test list was appropriate as a phoneme perception test tool for school-age children. Conclusion: The initial and final consonant test items developed through this study consisted of one target word and three examples which are a pair of minimum confrontations with the target word and are heteromorphic test lists consisting of easy and hard types according to the difficulty of the example. It could also be useful for not only the evaluation of the consonant perception ability but also rehabilitation.