Psychometrically Equivalent Digital Recordings for Speech Audiometry Testing in Mandarin Chinese: Standard Mandarin Dialect

The development of digitally recorded speech audiometry materials in Mandarin Chinese has been limited to date. High quality materials proliferate in the English language and have been developed for other languages such as Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, French, Italian, Polish, and Russian. The aims of this study were to develop, digitally record, evaluate, and equate words and word lists in Mandarin Chinese to use for speech reception threshold testing and for speech discrimination testing. The words that were evaluated were chosen from a Chinese frequency usage dictionary. One native male and one native female talker recorded the words onto a compact disc. These words were then evaluated on 20 normally-hearing subjects, all of whom were natives of mainland China. Following the tests, the words and word lists were analyzed using logistic regression. For speech reception threshold testing, 24 Mandarin Chinese trisyllabic words with steep psychometric function slopes were selected. Their intensities were adjusted to match the mean subject pure-tone average of 3.0 dB HL. The mean slopes for these selected male and female trisyllabic words were 11.3 %/dB and 12.1 %/dB, respectively. For the speech discrimination testing, the 200 bisyllabic words with the steepest logistic regression slopes were divided among four psychometrically equivalent lists of 50 words each and eight half-lists of 25 words each. The intensity of each word list was digitally adjusted so that the threshold of each list was equal to the midpoint between the mean thresholds of the male and female half-lists. All lists were homogeneous with respect to audibility and psychometric function slope. Digital recordings of the psychometrically equivalent word lists are included on a compact disc.

Name thesis:degree_name

MS

Grantor dc:publisher

Brigham Young University - Provo

Author dc:creator

• Jennings, Lara-Jill

• speech audiometry
• speech reception threshold
• SRT
• speech discrimination
• Chinese
• Standard Mandarin
• bisyllabic
• trisyllabic
• digital
• digitally recorded
• Communication Sciences and Disorders

Language dc:language

English

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/713

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarsarchive.byu.edu:etd-1712