We develop an alternative scheme of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking which is characterized by four-quark condensates instead of (7jq),*O. In this scheme the Nambu-Goldstone bosons acquire a mass squared - m~uark' in comparison with mquark in the usual scheme. The quark mass ratios and the parameters of the scheme are determined by an application to the pseudoscalar nonet spectrum (including 'lT0_'Yj_'Yj' mixing). The decays Iji -+('lT0 , 'Yj, 'Yj}y and Iji' -+ 1ji('lT0 , 'Yj) are also considered. The results do not promote the alternative scheme.