Written by William F. Carver, Ph.D., FAAA, FASHA, CCC(A)ret.

You may have read about one of the words employed in the Northwestern University Auditory Test Number 6 (NU-6): laud. This word, found in list 1, is routinely missed by clients. (In our experience, one of two responses are obtained: lord or log.) Some individuals have suggested substituting another word for laud, but agreement on a good substitute has not been forthcoming.

The final suggestion is that, until an adequate substitute be found, the list be considered a 49 word test and the scoring be changed: N x 2.041 = % correct. (Number correctly repeated times 2.041. We suggest rounding to the nearest whole number.). Auditec, Inc. is not prepared to eliminate laud from its recordings. We will leave it up to the audiologist to either ignore the subject’s response or include it in their scoring. A 2% difference in a word recognition test is certainly not significant.

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