The development of Cantonese Lexical Neighborhood Test: a pilot study

This study aimed at developing a theoretically driven open-set speech recognition test for pediatric clinical population of cochlear implant and/or hearing aid users, with Cantonese Chinese as their first language, to track progress in speech recognition performance as an outcome measurement of their rehabilitation.

Six monosyllabic and six disyllabic word lists were generated from the Cantonese CHILDES language database, constructed according to the Neighborhood Activation Model. There were three lexically "easy" and three lexically "hard" word lists in each sub-test, with 25 items in each list. Four pediatric cochlear implant users and 10 hearing aid users, with bilateral congenital severe to profound sensorineural hearing impairment and below the age of 10, participated in the study. Their performances on word recognition and phoneme recognition with the new test lists, as well as the inter-list equivalency, inter-rater reliability, and face validity of the new materials, were investigated.

Word recognition was higher among disyllables than monosyllables. Lexically "easy" disyllabic words were better recognized than their "hard" counterparts and the monosyllables. No significant difference was noted among the three lists in each combination of syllable structure and lexical property. High inter-rater reliability, as well as high correlation between Cantonese LNT score and a receptive vocabulary test score, were revealed.

These newly developed test lists provided reliable information on spoken word recognition of pediatric hearing prosthesis users with severe to profound hearing impairment. Inter-list equivalency and inter-rater reliability allowed monitoring of rehabilitation progress on such specific pediatric clinical population with this new test. (255).