New Sentence Recognition Materials Using a Basic Non-Native English Lexicon (Calandruccio et al., 2012)

Purpose The objective of this project was to develop new sentence test materials drawing on a basic non-native English lexicon that could be used to test speech recognition for various listener populations. These materials have been designed to provide a test tool that is less linguistically biased, compared with materials that are currently available, for sentence recognition for non-native as well as native speakers of English.

Method One hundred non-native speakers of English were interviewed on a range of 20 conversational topics. Over 26 hr of recorded non-native English speech were transcribed. These transcriptions were used to create a lexicon of over 4,000 unique words. The words from this lexicon were used to create the new materials based on a simple syntactic sentence structure frame.

Results Twenty lists of 25 sentences were developed. Each sentence has 4 keywords, providing 100 keywords per list. Lists were equated for rate of occurrence of keywords in lexicon, high-frequency count (total number of affricates and fricatives), number of syllables, and distribution of syntactic structure. Listening-in-noise results for native-English-speaking, normal-hearing listeners indicated similar performance across lists.

Conclusion The Basic English Lexicon materials provide a large set of sentences for native and non-native English speech-recognition testing.

项目宗旨 本项目的目标是开发一套基于基础非母语英语词汇的新句子测试材料，旨在为不同听者群体测试语音识别能力。这些材料旨在提供一种测试工具，相较于现有材料，在句子识别方面对非母语及母语为英语的说话者均具有较低的语用偏差。研究方法 本研究对一百名非母语英语使用者进行了涵盖20个交谈主题的访谈。共计超过26小时的非母语英语语音被转录。这些转录文本被用于创建一个包含超过4000个独特词汇的词汇表。该词汇表中的词汇被用于基于简单的句法结构框架创建新的材料。研究结果 开发了20份包含25个句子的列表。每个句子包含4个关键词，每个列表提供100个关键词。列表在关键词在词汇表中的出现频率、高频率计数（总的塞擦音和摩擦音数量）、音节数量以及句法结构的分布上进行了平衡。对于母语为英语的正常听力听者，在噪声环境下的听力测试结果显示，各列表之间的表现相似。结论 基础英语词汇表材料为母语及非母语英语的语音识别测试提供了一套庞大的句子集合。