The Sharvard Corpus: a phonemically-balanced Spanish sentence resource for audiology

Int J Audiol. 2014 Sep;53(9):633-8. doi: 10.3109/14992027.2014.907507. Epub 2014 May 26.

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.

Keywords: Spanish; Speech perception in noise; open speech resource; phonemic balance.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Acoustic Stimulation
  • Adult
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Middle Aged
  • Noise / adverse effects
  • Perceptual Masking
  • Phonetics*
  • Psychometrics
  • Recognition, Psychology
  • Spain
  • Speech Acoustics*
  • Speech Intelligibility
  • Speech Perception*
  • Speech Production Measurement
  • Speech Reception Threshold Test / methods*
  • Voice Quality*