Speech and Non-Speech Auditory Task Performance by Non-Native English Speakers

The results indicate that a number of English-based tests designed to assess auditory perception may be inappropriate for some Spanish-English bilingual adults. That is, some bilingual adults may perform worse than expected on tests that involve perceiving spoken English, in part because of linguistic differences, and not because of unusually poor auditory perception. The results also support the use of preliminary speech-in-noise screening tests in each of a bilingual patient's languages to establish if auditory perception tests in English are appropriate for a given individual. If a non-native English speaker's screening performance is worse in English than in the native language, one suggested strategy is to select auditory perceptual tests that are impacted minimally or not at all by linguistic differences.