Development and evaluation of a mixed gender, multi-talker matrix sentence test in Australian English

Abstract

Objective: To develop, in Australian English, the first mixed-gender, multi-talker matrix sentence test. Design: Speech material consisted of a 50-word base matrix whose elements can be combined to form sentences of identical syntax but unpredictable content. Ten voices (five female and five male) were recorded for editing and preliminary level equalization. Elements were presented as single-talker sentences-in-noise during two perceptual tests: an optimization phase that provided the basis for further level correction, and an evaluation phase that perceptually validated those changes. Study sample: Ten listeners participated in the optimization phase; these and an additional 32 naïve listeners completed the evaluation test. All were fluent in English and all but one had lived in Australia for >2 years. Results: Optimization reduced the standard deviation (SD) and speech reception threshold (SRT) range across all speech material (grand mean SRT = −10.6 dB signal-to-noise ratio, median = −10.8, SD =1.4, range =13.7, slope =19.3%/dB), yielding data consistent with cross-validated matrix tests in other languages. Intelligibility differences between experienced and naïve listeners were minimal. Conclusions: The Australian matrix corpus provides a robust set of test materials suitable for both clinical assessment and research into the dynamics of active listening in multi-talker environments.

Keywords:

• Matrix test
• speech reception threshold (SRT)
• speech intelligibility
• multitalker
• speech audiometry
• normative data

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the HearCom Project as copyright owners of the original matrix test. Permission was granted for non-commercial use of the word list. We would also like to thank Subha Nasir Ahmad, Chris Watson, Jennifer Lee, and Madeleine Bautista for their tireless good humour, patience and team spirit while this work was underway. We are also grateful to Martin Burgess and Anthony Wakulicz for their continual willingness to lend an ear during the corpus' refinement, and for their always incisive comments around how the material might best be deployed as a research tool with both control and clinical populations.

Declaration of interest

Recording, editing and perceptual testing of all speech material was performed by the authors at Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Sydney with input from the authors based at the Starkey Hearing Research Center (Berkeley). The University of Sydney received funding from Starkey Hearing Technologies to assist in making an Australian English recording of the Matrix sentence test. This recording has been made freely available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Simon Carlile holds professional appointments both at Starkey and at the University of Sydney; besides this, the authors report no declarations of interest.

Recordings from this corpus can be accessed online at https://starkeypro.com/research/research-resources/matrix-speech-material

Supplementary material available online