Assessing speech perception in listeners with cochlear implants: The development of the Lexical Neighborhood Tests

Recently, two new measures of spoken word recognition for children with sensory aids, the Lexical Neighborhood Test (LNT) and the Multisyllabic Lexical Neighborhood Test (MLNT), were developed at Indiana University School of Medicine. This review describes the theoretical motivation for the development of these tests and summarizes data concerning the word familiarity, interlist equivalency, and test-retest reliability of these new measures. One important new feature of these tests is that they provide information about the underlying perceptual processes supporting spoken word recognition in listeners with hearing loss. Over the last few years, the LNT and MLNT have been used to examine the influences of lexical difficulty and stimulus variability on spoken word recognition by children with cochlear implants. The results of these studies demonstrate that children with cochlear implants organize and access words from memory in a manner similar to listeners with normal hearing, and that they are sensitive to the indexical characteristics of the speech signal. The clinical implications of these findings are discussed.