Meyer T A, Pisoni D B
Department of Otolaryngology, DeVault Otologic Research Laboratory, Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis 46202, USA.
Ear Hear. 1999 Aug;20(4):363-71. doi: 10.1097/00003446-199908000-00008.
The Phonetically Balanced Kindergarten (PBK) Test (Haskins, Reference Note 2) has been used for almost 50 yr to assess spoken word recognition performance in children with hearing impairments. The test originally consisted of four lists of 50 words, but only three of the lists (lists 1, 3, and 4) were considered "equivalent" enough to be used clinically with children. Our goal was to determine if the lexical properties of the different PBK lists could explain any differences between the three "equivalent" lists and the fourth PBK list (List 2) that has not been used in clinical testing.
Word frequency and lexical neighborhood frequency and density measures were obtained from a computerized database for all of the words on the four lists from the PBK Test as well as the words from a single PB-50 (Egan, 1948) word list.
The words in the "easy" PBK list (List 2) were of higher frequency than the words in the three "equivalent" lists. Moreover, the lexical neighborhoods of the words on the "easy" list contained fewer phonetically similar words than the neighborhoods of the words on the other three "equivalent" lists.
It is important for researchers to consider word frequency and lexical neighborhood frequency and density when constructing word lists for testing speech perception. The results of this computational analysis of the PBK Test provide additional support for the proposal that spoken words are recognized "relationally" in the context of other phonetically similar words in the lexicon. Implications of using open-set word recognition tests with children with hearing impairments are discussed with regard to the specific vocabulary and information processing demands of the PBK Test.
语音平衡幼儿园（PBK）测试（哈斯金斯，参考文献2）已被用于评估听力障碍儿童的口语单词识别能力近50年。该测试最初由四组每组50个单词组成，但只有其中三组（第1、3和4组）被认为“等效”到足以在临床上用于儿童。我们的目标是确定不同PBK列表的词汇属性是否可以解释三组“等效”列表与第四组PBK列表（第2组）之间的任何差异，第2组尚未用于临床测试。
从计算机数据库中获取PBK测试四组列表中所有单词以及单个PB - 50（伊根，1948）单词列表中单词的词频、词汇邻域频率和密度测量值。
“简单”的PBK列表（第2组）中的单词频率高于三组“等效”列表中的单词。此外，“简单”列表中单词的词汇邻域包含的语音相似单词比其他三组“等效”列表中单词的邻域少。
研究人员在构建用于测试言语感知的单词列表时，考虑词频、词汇邻域频率和密度很重要。对PBK测试的这种计算分析结果为以下提议提供了额外支持：在词汇表中其他语音相似单词的语境中，口语单词是通过“关系”来识别的。关于PBK测试的特定词汇和信息处理要求，讨论了对听力障碍儿童使用开放式单词识别测试的意义。
