The CSS utilizes spoken word stimuli presented via earphone at low intensity against a lower intensity background masker noise (babble). The child repeats words and sentences and interacts with a touch screen to indicate comprehension and an examiner scores the utterance. The test items were derived from a series of studies in 1088 children and validated in an additional 246. A revised procedure, with fewer items, was administered to a new cohort of 225 preschool (age 3.5 to 5.5 years) children who were classified as language impaired (N=19), articulation impaired (N=23), mildly hearing impaired (N=27), or without impairment (N=169) based on a battery of standard diagnostic tests. Analyses consisted of (1) replication using discriminant function analyses matching items to earlier analyses for articulation and language and (2)exploratory analyses using a new strategy to score hearing. Table

Table 1
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