The word recognition scores of native-English listeners using word lists recorded in English from native-Spanish speakers with varied dialect

Abstract

The profession of audiology is working to recruit professionals from different ethnic backgrounds, particularly Hispanic, into the field to accommodate the increasingly diverse population of the United States. Speech audiometry, a routine part of the audiological test battery, would be most affected by this multicultural push because test scores could be affected by linguistic variations. The purpose of this study was to determine if the word recognition score of 21 native-English listeners would differ significantly if obtained using word lists recorded in English from two male native-Spanish speakers with varied degrees of dialect compared to one male native-English speaker. The results revealed that the participants scored significantly lower on words were recorded by native- Spanish speakers compared to the native-English speaker. This significant difference could lead to a misdiagnosis if the score were interpreted as true word recognition ability rather than a reflection of the audiologist's dialect.