Development of the computerized Mandarin pediatric lexical tone and disyllabic-word picture identification test in noise (MAPPID-N).

MAPPID-N was developed to assess the speech-recognition abilities in noise of Mandarin-speaking children on disyllabic words, and lexical tones in monosyllabic words, in a picture-identification test format. Twenty-six normal-hearing children aged four to nine years listened repeatedly to the test materials where noise was spatially mixed with or separated from speech, in different signal-to-noise (SNR) ratios, to obtain performance-SNR functions and SNR for 50% correct scores (SNR-50%). SNR-50% improved with age only when noise was spatially separated from speech but not when noise was mixed with speech, suggesting the improvement with age in the use of intensity and timing cues differences between the two ears. The homogeneity of the test items was improved by adjusting the intensity levels of individual test items to align their SNR-50% to the mean SNR-50% level.