Speech discrimination test system and device

[0103]In an embodiment the inventors have provided a test based on the ability of a subject to discriminate between speech sounds, rather than on a subject's ability to identify a speech sound, thereby allowing for a test method and device that may be effectively applied across language barriers. Such a test may never require the subject to identify a speech sound (such as by spelling it out or identifying it as a written word or a word of a language), other than to discriminate which sound is different to another that has been presented.

[0104]In an embodiment the invention is based on measuring the ability of a subject to correctly discriminate the odd speech sound present in sequence of other speech sounds. For example, pairs of speech sounds may be presented in sequential triplets, in which a first speech sound is presented once and a second speech sound is presented twice (such that the first speech sound is the ‘odd one out’). For example, if two speech sounds presented are [aja]