Instructions to authors

An informative, structured abstract of no more than 250 words should accompany each manuscript. Abstracts for original contributions should be structured into the following sections： AIM： Only the purpose should be included. METHODS： The materials, techniques, instruments and equipments, and the experimental procedures should be included. RESULTS： The observatory and experimental results, including data, effects, outcome, etc. should be included. Authors should present P value where necessary, and the significant data should accompany. CONCLUSION： Accurate view and the value of the results should be included. The format of structured abstracts is at： http：//www.wjgnet.com/wjg/help/11 .doc

Development of SC-10: A psychometrically equivalent Singapore Mandarin disyllabic word list for clinical speech audiometry use

Objective::The aim of this study is to develop and evaluate a set of psychometrically equivalent disyllabic wordlist(SC-10)in Singapore Mandarin for clinical use.Study design::A preliminary set of 1000 words were obtained from a dictionary of frequently used words by Singapore students.Ten native judges rate the familiarity level of each word.This is followed by a face-to-face public survey to rank the shortlisted word set from most to least familiar.The final 108 disyllabic words were recorded by a native female talker.20 normal hearing subjects were used to obtain the percentage of correct word recognition at 24 intensity levels(-10 dB HL to 26 dB HL in 2 dB increment).Psychometric function slopes were calculated for each word.100 words were eventually chosen and assigned into ten 10-word lists based on a psychometric balancing protocol.Minor digital adjustments were made to the intensity of each wordlist to improve their auditory homogeneity.Results::The calculated regression slopes in the psychometric functions for the ten lists are between 8.0 and 9.8%/dB.Single factor ANOVA analysis showed no significant difference in both the mean intensity required to obtain 50%recognition score(f=0.109,df=9,p=0.999)and the slopes of the psychometric functions(f=0.078,df=9,p=0.999)between the ten word lists.List validation on 25 normal hearing participants(PTA=11.0 dB HL,SD=4.3)showed a mean speech recognition threshold(SRT)of 9.3 dB HL(SD=3.5)and regression slope of 8.395%/dB.Quadratic regression analysis showed a positive correlation(r^(2)=0.923)between presentation level and word recognition score(WRS).The difference between PTA and SRT of each subject all fall within the clinically acceptable difference of 10 dB HL.Test-retest reliability,carried out on 20 subjects at three levels(SRT-5,SRT,and SRT+5 dB),showed no significance difference between word recognition score when the same participant is tested again at the same intensity level using a different wordlist.Conclusion::All in all,it shows that the SC-10 speech materials are valid for clinical use for Mandarin speech audiometry in Singapore.

Academic Lexical Items in Economics Journal Papers

This paper reports a study into the use of lexical items in economics journal papers. The corpus in this study （EC） consisted of 907,380 running words from 120 journal papers randomly selected from economics journals which were written by native English speakers. The results showed that the Academic Word List （AWL） accounted for 12.74% of the tokens in EC and the distribution of AWL in EC was uneven. In the case study of the key words, only four out of nine key words ranked by keyness were AWL words, while the other five were from the General Service List （GSL）. Moreover, those nine key words together with other three key functional expressions were employed to fulfill discourse and rhetorical functions in academic writings. Pedagogical implications are also discussed within this paper.