Objectives: To raise awareness and propose a good practice guide for translating and adapting any hearing-related questionnaire to be used for comparisons across populations divided by language or culture, and to encourage investigators to publish detailed steps. Design: From a synthesis of existing guidelines, we propose important considerations for getting started, followed by six early steps: (1) Preparation, (2, 3) Translation steps, (4) Committee Review, (5) Field testing and (6) Reviewing and finalising the translation. Study sample: Not applicable. Results: Across these six steps, 22 different items are specified for creating a questionnaire that promotes equivalence to the original by accounting for any cultural differences. Published examples illustrate how these steps have been implemented and reported, with shared experiences from the authors, members of the International Collegium of Rehabilitative Audiology and TINnitus research NETwork. Conclusions: A checklist of the preferred reporting items is included to help researchers and clinicians make informed choices about conducting or omitting any items. We also recommend using the checklist to document these decisions in any resulting report or publication. Following this step-by-step guide would promote quality assurance in multinational trials and outcome evaluations but, to confirm functional equivalence, large-scale evaluation of psychometric properties should follow.

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The two versions of the MHINT are the first standardized Mandarin sentence speech intelligibility tests. Similar to other language versions of the HINT, the MHINT was developed using the same rationale as the English HINT, allowing norm-referenced results for the MHINT to be compared directly with results in other languages. The MHINT would benefit from further evaluation of its validity.

This study investigated whether cochlear implant users can identify Cantonese lexical tones, which differ primarily in their F0 pattern. Seventeen early-deafened deaf children (age= 4 years, 6 months to 8 years, 11 months; postoperative period= 11-41 months) took part in the study. Sixteen children were fitted with the Nucleus 24 cochlear implant system; one child was fitted with a Nucleus 22 implant. Participants completed a 2AFC picture identification task in which they identified one of the six contrastive Cantonese tones produced on the monosyllabic target word /ji/. Each target stimulus represented a concrete object and was presented within a carrier phrase in sentence-medial position. Group performance was significantly above chance for three contrasts. However, the cochlear implant listeners performed much worse than a 6 1/2-year-old, moderately hearing impaired control listener who was tested on the same task. These findings suggest that this group of cochlear implant users had great difficulty in extracting the pitch information needed to accurately identify Cantonese lexical tones.

Hearing aid satisfaction is a pleasurable emotional experience as an outcome of an evaluation of performance. Many tools have been designed to measure the degree of satisfaction overall, or along the dimensions of cost, appearance, acoustic benefit, comfort, and service. Various studies have used these tools to examine the relationships between satisfaction and other factors. Findings are not always consistent across studies, but in general, hearing aid satisfaction has been found to be related to experience, expectation, personality and attitude, usage, type of hearing aids, sound quality, listening situations, and problems in hearing aid use. Inconsistent findings across studies and difficulties in evaluating the underlying relationships are probably caused by problems with the tools (eg, lack of validity) and the methods used to evaluate relationships (eg, correlation analyses evaluate association and not causal effect). Whether satisfaction changes over time and how service satisfaction contributes to device satisfaction are unclear. It is hoped that this review will help readers understand current satisfaction measures, how various factors affect satisfaction, and how the way satisfaction is measured may be improved to yield more reliable and valid data. IntroductionSatisfaction, according to the Oxford Advanced Dictionary (2000), is the good feeling that one has achieved something or when something that one wanted to happen does happen. Satisfaction has been variably described in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (1996) as the fulfillment or gratification of a desire, a need, or an appetite; a pleasure or contentment derived from such gratification; and a source or means of gratification. Similarly, Oliver (1997) defines satisfaction as a pleasurable fulfillment in that the consumer feels that his or her needs, desires, and goals have been fulfilled in a pleasurable manner. Satisfaction is thus an emotional and pleasurable experience that confirms that something right has happened and provides a driving force to sustain the effort that yields this feeling.Tse (1988) defined consumer satisfaction as "the consumer's response to the evolution of the perceived discrepancy between prior expectations and the actual performance of the product as perceived after its consumption ." Oliver (1981) further described satisfaction "as an evaluation of the surprise inherent in a product acquisition and/or consumption experience. . . . Satisfaction is the emotional reaction following a disconfirmation experience (an evaluation of performance against expectations) which acts on the base attitude level and is consumption-specific." Overall, satisfaction is commonly described as a pleasurable emotional experience, as an outcome of product performance evaluation against expectations.Satisfaction is crucial to the whole hearing aid fitting process and its importance in audiology is evidenced by the fact that it is frequently included as a measure of outcome (Cox and Alexander, 1999;Dillon et al., 1999;...

Consistent with previous findings to some extent, the present findings suggest that lexical tones are relatively redundant cues for Mandarin sentence intelligibility in quiet and that other cues could compensate for the distorted lexical tone contour. However, in noise, the results provide direct evidence that lexical tone contour is important for the recognition of Mandarin sentences.

The CHINT is the first standardized Cantonese sentence speech intelligibility test. The CHINT was developed using the same rationale as the English HINT, allowing norm reference results from the two tests to be compared directly across languages. Results showed the CHINT is a reliable test. The CHINT would benefit from further evaluation of validity.

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