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Purpose: In this study, the authors examined the validity of using materials from 2 nonregional yet mutually intelligible dialects to evaluate an individual's speech recognition threshold (SRT) and word recognition (WR) abilities and whether a speaker of 1 dialect could accurately administer and score materials in the other dialect.
Method: Previously created SRT and WR materials were presented to 32 Mandarin listeners with normal hearing: 16 speakers of Mainland Mandarin and 16 speakers of Taiwan Mandarin. Hearing abilities were examined using SRT and WR materials created for speakers from 2 different regional dialects. Presentation of the materials occurred during 2 test sessions, counterbalanced across material and listener dialect. Listener responses were evaluated by 2 judges; 1 spoke Mainland Mandarin, and the other spoke Taiwan Mandarin.
Results: For the SRT and WR results, differences in listener performance were statistically significant across material and listener dialect, with threshold differences of less than 2 dB HL when collapsed across session. The interscorer percentage of agreement was 99.5% for SRT and 99.1% for WR testing. Conclusion: Testing with materials in a different regional dialect does have a measurable impact on SRT and WR performance. However, this difference, though reliable, is small enough to have a negligible impact on clinical findings.
Key Words: audiology, dialect, hearing, hearing loss, speech recognition, assessment
Previous research has yielded conflicting findings regarding the presentation of speech audiometry materials in a regional dialect other than that of the participants. Although one study found little or no differ- ence in the results of speech audiometry testing when using materials from nonregional dialects of Spanish (Schneider, 1992), other researchers have concluded that a speaker's dialect may affect his or her performance on speech audi- ometry evaluations (Ramkissoon, 2001; von Hapsburg & Peña, 2002; Weisleder & Hodgson, 1989), suggesting that speech audiometry scores decline when materials are not presented in the native regional dialect. However, investiga- tions of the effect of regional dialects of languages other than Spanish have yet to be made. Furthermore, the variables of both the regional dialect of the talker who presents the materials as well as the judge who scores the spoken re- sponses might profitably be examined. In the present study, we examined regional dialect differences in two dialects of Mandarin,...