The development of Mandarin-Chinese phonetically balanced monosyllable words test lists

Aims To develop a set of monosyllable audiometry materials that can be used to test speech recognition in Mandarin Chinese. Methods In keeping with both the reliability and efficiency in clinical practice, a set of 30 test lists with 25 monosyllable test items each was designed according to the following principles: shortness of the lists, phonetic balance(PB), word familiarity, coverage of common words, and equivalence among lists. The 30 lists that were composed of 750 monosyllabic words were constructed based on Chinese phoneme distribution probability summarized in "Acoustics Manual". The presentation frequency of 22 consonants, 36 vowels, and 4 tones of Chinese Mandarin characters in the 30 test lists were then calculated. To achieve PB, 489 monosyllables were selected from the most commonly used 2500 Chinese characters and the monosyllable words in the most commonly used 4000 Chinese phrases to compile the 30 monosyllable test lists using a computer algorithm and manual adjustment. Results Thirty PB word lists were compiled using common Mandarin Chinese monosyllabic words. Each list consisted of 25 monosyllables. A total of 489 phonemes (consonants, vowels, and tones) were included in the set of 30 lists. Conclusion This set of lists can potentially be used as the basic lists for Mandarin PB monosyllable speech tests in the future.