Abstract
Objective: The current study describes the collection of a new phonemically-balanced Spanish sentence resource, known as the Sharvard Corpus. Design: The resource contains 700 sentences inspired by the original English Harvard sentences along with speech recordings from a male and female native peninsular Spanish talker. Sentences each contain five keywords for scoring and are grouped into 70 lists of 10 sentences using an automatic phoneme-balancing procedure. Study sample: Twenty-three native Spanish listeners identified keywords in the Sharvard sentences in speech-shaped noise. Results: Psychometric functions for the Sharvard sentences indicate mean speech reception thresholds of − 6.07 and − 6.24 dB, and slopes of 10.53 and 11.03 percentage points per dB at the 50% keywords correct point for male and female talkers respectively. Conclusions: The resulting open source collection of Spanish sentence material for speech perception testing is available online.
Notes
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the LISTA Project, funded from the Future and Emerging Technologies programme within the 7th Framework Programme for Research of the European Commission, FET-Open grant number 256230. We thank Ainara Imaz for initial screening of the Spanish translations and Letizia Marchegiani and Albino Nogueiras for making available the pronunciation dictionary.
Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest.
Notes
1. http://www.talp.upc.edu/index.php/technology/tools/signal-processing-tools/81-saga. Last viewed July 10, 2013.
2. http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict. Last viewed July 10, 2013.