Development and Evaluation of the Mandarin Quick Speech-in-Noise Test Materials in Mainland China

Objective: To develop and evaluate the Mandarin Quick Speech-in-Noise (M-Quick SIN) Test materials in mainland China. Design: Four parts were included in the experiment to (1) develop sentence materials and select equivalent sentences, (2) evaluate the reliability of the lists we grouped afterwards, (3) discuss the formula of SNR loss fitted for M-Quick SIN, and (4) quantify the classification of SNR loss among normal-hearing and hearing-impaired people. 132 normal-hearing and 30 hearing-impaired subjects were participated in the experiment. Results: A 300 sentence corpus was established and 78 sentences with better homogeneity were selected from it. After the equivalence and the test-retest reliability was established for the group materials, 11 equivalent lists for research and clinical use were chosen. The SNR-50 value for these sentences was -2 dB for normal-hearing people, and the formula was defined as “SNR loss=24.5-correct words”. The classification of SNR loss was preliminarily quantified as: normal (≤ -2 dB), mild (-2 to 10 dB), moderate (10 to 20 dB) and severe (≥ 20 dB). Conclusions: The M-Quick SIN test provided us 11 equivalent test lists (each list had 6 sentences and 30 key words) and 2 practice lists for testing normal-hearing and hearing-impaired people. The normal value of SNR-50 was -2 dB SNR, and the 6 SNRs: 20, 15, 10, 5, 0, -5 dB SNR were determined to test SNR loss for the M-Quick SIN.