The current article describes the results, inter-scorer reliability, and potential sources of bias in conducting speech-language assessments with Aboriginal children in remote Ontario communities using videoconferencing. A main focus of this pilot study was to examine scoring bias, an issue that might arise with videoconferencing for any population but that could potentially interact with test and cultural bias to negatively affect the diagnosis of Aboriginal children. Assessments were administered by a remote-site speech-language pathologist (SLP), while an on-site SLP served as an assistant. Responses were scored simultaneously by both SLPs and the results and their degree of correspondence were compared. Percentage agreement ranged from 96-100% for language tests and from 66-100% for the articulation measure. Results suggest that videoconferencing can be an effective complement to service provision when procedures are organized so as to minimize bias in test administration and in the interpretation of test performance.

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Objective Universal newborn hearing screening has become standard practice in many countries. The primary goal of this study was to assess the impact of early identification of permanent childhood hearing loss on oral communication development. Setting Participants were recruited from three clinical programmes in two cities in the province of Ontario, Canada. The study sample was born during two consecutive periods of newborn hearing screening. The first period, prior to 2002, was targeted on high-risk infants only, and the second, from 2002, included both high-and standard-risk infants (universal newborn hearing screening -UNHS). All children were enrolled in rehabilitation programmes focused on oral language development. Methods In this multicentre observational study, 65 children under the age of five years with onset of hearing loss before six months of age, 26 identified through systematic newborn screening (14 through targeted screening and 12 through UNHS) and 39 without screening, were assessed with an extensive battery of child-and parent-administered speech and language measures. The degree of hearing loss ranged from mild to profound with 22 children in the mild, moderate and moderately severe categories and 43 in the severe and profound categories. Data are reported for the three-year study period. Results The screened group of children was identified at a median age of 6.6 (interquartile range, 3.0-8.2) months and children referred from sources other than newborn screening were diagnosed at a median age of 16.5 (interquartile range, 10.2-29.0) months. Assessment of oral communication development showed no significant difference between the screened and unscreened groups. The communication outcomes for children identified before 12 months of age did not differ from those of later identified children. Conclusions Systematic screening of newborn hearing results in earlier identification and intervention for children with permanent hearing loss. Superior language outcome following newborn screening was not demonstrable in the setting of this study.

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The HINT provides an efficient and reliable method of assessing speech intelligibility in quiet and in noise by using an adaptive strategy to measure speech reception thresholds for sentences, thus avoiding ceiling and floor effects that plague traditional measures performed at fixed presentation levels A strong need for such a test within the Canadian Francophone population, led us to develop a French version of the HINT. Here we describe the development of this test. The Canadian French version is composed of 240-recorded sentences, equated for intelligibility, and cast into 12 phonemically balanced 20-sentence lists. Average headphone SRTs, measured with 36 adult Canadian Francophone native speakers with normal hearing, were 16.4 dBA in quiet, -3.0 dBA SNR in a 65 dBA noise front condition and -11.4 dBA SNR in a 65 dBA noise side condition. Reliability was established by means of within-subjects standard deviation of repeated SRT measurements over different lists and yielded values of 2.2 and 1.1 dB for the quiet and noise conditions, respectively.