Re-evaluation of Words Used in Speech Audiometry

The aim of this paper is to identify the words which significantly increase or decrease recognition accuracy in speech audiometry at the Clinic for Ear, Throat and Nose Diseases in Novi Sad, Serbia. The subjects of this research were 66 patients diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, most of whom are hearing unimpaired. Words with the highest and the lowest percentage of recognition are explained from a linguistic point of view, taking into consideration their occurrence, existence of similar words, phonetic characteristics of sounds and phonological makeup of the words. The analysis suggests that minimal pairs are more likely to cause incorrect repetitions than words which do not have minimal pair neighbours (plosives are especially difficult in this respect, due to the feature of voicing and formant transitions of the following vowel). Our results also show that longer and more frequent words are easier for identification, as well as the words with rising accents.