Item-Analysis of Japanese Monosyllable List for Speech Discrimination Test

A review and discussion of criteria for construction of the Japanese monosyllable list presently used, rank order of frequency of the CV syllable in the printed matters were presented.Item-analysis studies, including difficulty, selectivity, and correlation-to-total of items (syllables) of the list were performed on 300 clinical cases whose discrimination scores by the list itself distributed rectangularly from 32 to 90%. The results indicated that difficulty of syllables did not distribute uniformly, and selectivity of syllables were not distinctive, and some syllables had dead weight. It was concluded that the better criteria for Japanese monosyllable list should be set up on phonemic auditory discrimination rather than linguistic statistics on the syllables.