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Purpose: The Chinese Sound Test (Hung, Lin, Tsai, & Lee, 2016) has been recently developed as a modified version of the Ling Six-Sound Test (Ling, 2012). By incorporating Chinese speech sounds, this test should be able to estimate whether the listener can hear across the Chinese speech spectrum. To establish the clinical validity of the test, this study examined the relationship between the aided audiometric thresholds and the distance thresholds. Method: Sixty children with bilateral hearing aids were recruited. The aided sound-field thresholds at 250,500,1000,2000,4000, and 6000 Hz were compared with the distance thresholds of six sounds, /u, 8,a, i, teh, and s/, which encompass the entire Chinese speech frequency range from low to high. Results: Partial correlation and stepwise regression analyses revealed that the Chinese testing sounds are frequency specific and that the audibility of each sound could be predicted by a specific frequency threshold. Conclusions: The results confirm the validity of the Chinese Sound Test, indicating that the testing sounds can be reliably used to assess the perception of frequency-specific information. Crucially, these data also demonstrate that the Chinese Sound Test is a useful tool to identify red flags of poor auditory access in daily environment to monitor device malfunctions and possible hearing fluctuations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Because the Ling six-sound test is based on American English phonemes, it can yield unreliable results when administered to non-English speakers. In this study, we aimed to improve specifically the diagnostic palette for Mandarin Chinese users by developing an adapted version of the Ling six-sound test. Method: To determine the set of testing sounds, we performed an exhaustive acoustic and statistical analysis in which we considered not only the general acoustic properties but also the order of acquisition and the inter- and intraspeaker variability. Results: Six phonemes (/u, ə, a, i, tɕh, s/) were selected as the testing items for the Mandarin Chinese sound test because these sounds exhibit a highly compartmentalized frequency specificity, spanning the entire Chinese speech spectrum, as well as a relatively low articulatory variability and can be acquired fairly early. Conclusion: Through adopting language-dependent modifications, caregivers and professionals should have a more adequate tool to monitor children’s auditory access to the full range of Mandarin speech sounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]