Speech Recognition Thresholds for Multilingual Populations

An omnibus survey conducted in 1994 by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association reported that 85% of audiologists were monolingual English-speakers. Speech audiometry is typically conducted with English materials. However, a large and growing segment of the U.S. population is from non-English-speaking families. In the current climate, monolingual English-speaking audiologists who serve a rapidly growing minority population are ethically and legally challenged to develop valid speech audiometry tests. This article traces the development of speech audiometry in the United States and reports on the current status, focusing on the needs of a multilingual population in terms of measuring speech recognition threshold.