Psychometric properties of the Standard-Chinese lexical neighborhood test

Abstract

Conclusion: The psychometric characteristics of Standard-Chinese lexical neighborhood test (LNT) confirmed the lexical effects of the four word categories. The established normative baseline can be used in evaluating the word-recognition performance of the hearing-impaired listeners. Objectives: The purpose of the present study was to examine the psychometric characteristics and evaluate the reliability of Standard-Chinese LNT in children and adults. Methods: Twenty-six normal-hearing adults and 13 normal-hearing children were recruited. Word recognition was tested with the Standard-Chinese LNT materials that consisted of four types of word list: monosyllable easy words, monosyllable hard words, disyllable easy words, and disyllable hard words. Results: The thresholds at 50% correct performance for the easy word lists and disyllable word lists were lower than those for the hard word lists and monosyllable word lists, respectively (all p < 0.001). The slopes for disyllable words were steeper than the monosyllable words (p < 0.05). In addition, the recognition threshold of the four categories for children was higher than that for adults (all p < 0.05). The critical difference was on average 26.6% for adults and 30.0% for children.

Keywords::

• Psychometric function
• reliability
• critical difference
• Mandarin Chinese
• speech recognition test

Acknowledgment

The study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81170916 and 30872859).

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.