The Lexical Neighborhood Test: An Indian-English Version for Children

Abstract

The study involved the development of a Lexical Neighbourhood Test in Indian- English for children. The developed test containing 2 lists, each having 10 lexically easy words and 10 lexically hard words, were administered on 30 normal hearing children aged 6 to 8 years. In addition, 5 children with hearing impairment, using amplification devices, were also studied. Wilcoxon sign rank test was done to study the inter-list equivalency and the Mann-Whitney’s U test was done to check the effect of age on the developed ‘The Lexical Neighbourhood Test in Indian-English’. No significant inter-list differences were observed for both the lexically easy and lexically hard words. However, there was a significant difference between the younger (6 to 6;11 years) and older age group(7 to 8years) for lexically easy and lexically ‘hard’ words (i. e., those that occurred often and had only a few words that were phonemically similar) were identified correctly more often then lexically 'hard ' words (i.e., those that occurred less number of times and had many words that were phonemically similar). This was seen in both the normal hearing children and the children with hearing impairment. However, the latter group performed significantly poorer than the former group. The results demonstrated that the LNT in Indian-English provided reliable information about spoken word identification abilities of children with profound hearing loss who use amplification devices. In addition, the developed test also provided detailed information about the way children organized and accessed spoken words from long-term lexical memory.