[Possibilities and limits of speech audiometry in non-German speaking foreigners].

The possibility of testing the discrimination for monosyllabic words in the so-called "Freiburger-Sprachtest by Hahlbrock" in foreigners, who are unable to speak or to understand the German language, is discussed in the literature with different results. Most of the authors and experts advocate the opinion, that the monosyllabic word test (with test words in German) is not valid for foreigners. In our own medical expertizing we found, that this opinion is incorrect and invalid. Foreigners unable to speak or understand German can be examined with the monosyllabic discrimination test by Hahlbrock. The results were fully comparable with the results from Germans. To safeguard these results of discrimination tests, 50 randomized foreigners without any knowledge of German were examined under exact conditions in the same way as Germans. The result of these examinations prove the possibility of testing the discrimination for monosyllabic words in foreigners, who cannot speak or understand German words, via the Hahlbrock test or whispering word test.