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

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.