A Mandarin Chinese–Oriented Sound Test (Hung et al., 2016)

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, tɕ^h, 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.