A new toy test to investigate the hearing status of young children who have English as a second language: a preliminary report.

The aim of this study was to produce a word list suitable for children aged between 2 and 6 years with English as a second language (E2L) to be used in the format of a toy test to evaluate hearing status. Two lists of English words were compiled using words previously shown to be among the early English words learned by children from the Indian sub-continent. These word lists were evaluated in a group of 56 children who had recently arrived from Bangladesh. The results of this study yielded a final word list of 12 words, arranged into six pairs of words with matched vowels. This final word list, used in the E2L Toy Test, is currently being evaluated in a multi-centre study, for children between the ages of 3 and 6 years.