ABSTRACT
Background: Accessibility to reliable and cost-effective assessment of auditory processing skills is limited in South Africa. With the development of tele-audiology, tools such as the Feather Squadron (FS) application have been developed to make this form of assessment more cost-effective and accessible.
Purpose: To determine whether the performance on the FS correlates with performance on certain traditional assessment tasks, viz. Frequency Pattern Test (FPT) and Dichotic Digits Test (DDT), to establish its relevance in a South African population.
Design: A retrospective, within-subject, comparative design was used.
Study Sample: 66 South African participants, aged between 8 and 9 years of age and educated in English.
Method: The FS, FPT and DDT were administered following a peripheral hearing assessment. The data were considered in two ways: Firstly, by comparing whether in each instance the participant had scored either at or below -2SD or whether they had scored above-2SD on the subtests of the FS and compared these scores to the same traditional tests, and secondly, by comparing the Z-scores obtained on the FS versus the Z-scores obtained on the same traditional test by applying a double arcsine transformation.
Results: Using the -2SD criteria yielded no significant association when comparing the Dichotic Digits FS vs Dichotic Digits traditional test, or when comparing Tonal-Pattern Temporal Processing FS vs FPT in the humming or labelling conditions. Using the Z-score comparison, a statistically significant correlation was obtained when comparing the Tonal-Pattern Temporal Processing FS vs FPT, labelling condition and Dichotic Double-Words FS (linguistic) vs DDT.
Conclusions: There is sufficient early evidence to suggest a statistically significant correlation between certain subtests of the FS with traditional tests of auditory processing to merit its use in the South African population. Further, using the broad pass/fail criteria of -2SD lacks the precision to adequately identify patterns of response and may need to be re-evaluated.
Key Words: Feather Squadron, dichotic digits, frequency pattern, auditory processing, South Africa. / Dissertation (MA (Audiology)) University of Pretoria, 2020. / 2022/12/31 / Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology / MA (Audiology) / Restricted
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:up/oai:repository.up.ac.za:2263/78439 |
| Date | January 2020 |
| Creators | Allan, Heidi |
| Contributors | Pottas, Lidia, heidi@reconnectlifestyle.co.za, Soer, Maggi E. (Magdalena Elizabeth) |
| Publisher | University of Pretoria |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Rights | © 2019 University of Pretoria. All rights reserved. The copyright in this work vests in the University of Pretoria. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the University of Pretoria. |
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