Chinese Emotional Speech Audiometry Project (Tang et al., 2024)

Purpose: The Chinese Emotional Speech Audiometry Project (CESAP) aims to establish a new material set for Chinese speech audiometry tests, which can be used in both neutral and emotional prosody settings. As the first endeavor of CESAP, this study demonstrates the development of the material foundation and reports its validation in neutral prosody.

Method: In the development step, 40 phonetically balanced word lists consisting of 30 Chinese disyllabic words with neutral valence were first generated. In a following affective rating experiment, 35 word lists were qualified for validation based on the familiarity and valence ratings from 30 normal-hearing (NH) participants. For validation, performance-intensity functions of each word list were fitted with responses from 60 NH subjects under six presentation levels (−1, 3, 5, 7, 11, and 20 dB HL). The final material set was determined by the intelligibility scores at each decibel level and the mean slopes.

Results: First, 35 lists satisfied the criteria of phonetic balance, limited repetitions, high familiarity, and neutral valence and were selected for validation. Second, 15 lists were compiled in the final material set based on the pairwise differences in intelligibility scores and the fitted 20%–80% slopes. The established material set had high reliability and validity and was sensitive to detect intelligibility changes (50% slope: 6.20%/dB; 20%–80% slope: 5.45%/dB), with small covariance of variation for thresholds (15%), 50% slope (12%), and 20%–80% slope (12%).

Conclusion: Our final material set of 15 word lists takes the initiative to control the emotional aspect of audiometry tests, which enriches available Mandarin speech recognition materials and warrants future assessments in emotional prosody among populations with hearing impairments.

Supplemental Material S1. Word recognition scores at seven presentation levels in the pilot experiment.

Supplemental Material S2. Key parameters of performance-intensity curves for 35 lists in the pilot experiment.

Supplemental Material S3. Threshold and slope values of the psychometric function of 30 lists in the formal experiment.

Supplemental Material S4. Significant pairwise differences by Tukey HSD among 30 lists.

Supplemental Material S5. A sample word list representative of our final material set.

Tang, E., Gong, J., Zhang, J., Zhang, J., Fang, R., Guan, J., & Ding, H. (2024). Chinese Emotional Speech Audiometry Project (CESAP): Establishment and validation of a new material set with emotionally neutral disyllabic words. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 67(6), 1945–1963. https://doi.org/10.1044/2024_JSLHR-23-00625