Audiogram of Chinese Phonemes: Construction and Evaluation.

Introduction: In aural rehabilitation, speech bananas are often used as a counseling tool to visually indicate one's auditory access to speech sounds. We constructed a Chinese-based speech banana to provide Chinese-speaking users with a more appropriate distribution of Chinese speech sounds on an audiogram.

Method: The location of each phoneme was defined by its frequency and intensity. To evaluate the clinical validity of the proposed speech banana, 15 Chinese-speaking hearing aid users were recruited; the predictability of the present speech banana was examined in terms of sensitivity and specificity based on their aided sound-field narrow-band noise thresholds and speech recognition thresholds.

Results: The data revealed high specificity rates of 94.2% below 8,000 Hz and high sensitivity of 96.8% above 8,000 Hz. Specificity measures the percentage of perceptible sounds correctly identified as such by the Chinese speech banana (CSB); sensitivity measures the percentage of imperceptible sounds that are correctly identified as such by the CSB.

Discussion/conclusion: The CSB represents a potentially valid counseling tool to identify phonemes that have poor perceptual quality and indicate auditory access gaps.