Development and validation of a new Mandarin tone identification test

ObjectivesThe objectives of this study were to develop a new Mandarin tone identification test (MTIT) to assess the Mandarin tone identification ability of children with hearing impairment (HI) and at age around 7 years; and to evaluate the reliability and sensitivity of the MTIT.MethodsThe word materials to be used in the MTIT were developed in Phase I. Monosyllables were chosen to represent the daily repertoire of young children and to avoid the influence of co-articulation and intonation. Each test stimulus set contained four words, with one target, one containing contrastive tone, and two unrelated distracters. All words were depicted using simple pictures, and the test targets in quiet or in noise were presented using recorded stimuli on a custom software. Phase II evaluated the reliability and sensitivity of the MTIT. Participants were 50 normal-hearing native-Mandarin speakers around 7 years of age.ResultsIn Phase I, the MTIT was developed as described above. The final test consists of 51 words that are within the vocabulary repertoire of children aged 7 years. In Phase II, with the Mandarin tone identification scores collected from 50 children, the repeated measure ANOVA showed a significant main effect of S/N on MTIT performance (p < 0.001). Pairwise comparisons revealed a significant difference in performance across the five S/N conditions (p < 0.01) when S/N varied from −30 to −10 dB. Cronbach's alpha at −15 dB S/N was 0.66, suggesting satisfactory internal consistency reliability. A paired-samples t-test showed that there was no significant difference between the test–retest scores across the five S/N conditions (p > 0.05).ConclusionsCompared with the available Mandarin tone identification tools, MTIT systematically evaluated the tone identification performance in noisy environment for normal hearing children at age around 7 years. Results also showed satisfactory internal consistency reliability, good test–retest reliability and good sensitivity. In the near future, MTIT could be used to evaluate tone perception ability of children with hearing impairment and help to design hearing rehabilitation strategies for this population at the age critical for their language learning.