Rather than the pure tone tests, speech tests are more appropriate for the school-and preschool-aged children to evaluate their communication abilities. In most major hearing testing facilities in Korea, there are no specific and standardized materials for the word recognition test of the school-and preschool-aged children. They utilized subjectively selected words out of adult test materials, simple naming or body pointing tests or newly developed materials such as Evaluation of Auditory

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... se to Speech-Korea (EARS-K) and Hallym University Word Discrimination test by Pictures (HU-WDP). Therefore, the development of new material is necessary and the characteristics of the existing materials should be investigated. In this study, we analyzed the word lists that are mostly used clinically in Korea in terms of the frequency of phonemes, familiarity, properness. Although there were differences among list, compared with phonemic frequency of the routine conversational speech the followings were found. The initial consonants and the vowels seem to included excessively with 'ᆸ' and 'ᄎ' for the school-aged children' list and 'ᆸ' and 'ᄏ' for the preschool-aged children's list. The vowels seem to included excessively with 'ᅲ' and 'ᅬ' for the school-aged children's list and 'ᅱ' and 'ᅢ' for the preschool-aged children's list. Most words seem to have final consonants while the percentage of the appearance of no final consonants in the conversational speech is 65%. The most frequently used final consonant was 'ᆨ', 'ᆸ' for the school-aged children's list and 'ᆨ' for the preschool-aged children's list. Considering limitation of the children's words, the distortion of the phonemic frequency from the routine conversational speech seems inevitable. The familiarity of the lists were pretty good since 100% of words were rated with fist grade in commonly used words except one word list that included 71% of the first graded commonly used words. Conclusively, all these factors should considered the development of the new standardized word lists for the school-and preschool-aged children in Korea. KEY WORDS:Word recognition test for the school and preschool aged children•Frequency of phonemes•Familiarity.