Overview

Paradigm selection plays an essential role in speech quality measurement. Among other things, specifications of language and speech test material make up part of the respective paradigm. The markedness of different features in the test material influences the test results in a significant way. The studies on speech comprehensibility and intelligibility in the previous chapters document this. They focus mainly on linguistic questions. Essentially, from the point of view of perception they consider each speech element as being equally distinguishable. Anyhow, we know that a /m/ (/main/ ) is perceptually much closer to a /n/(/naln/ ) than it is to a / S/ (/Sain/ ). In the intelligibility context, a confusion between and is not as severe as a confusion of and . This has to be encountered for both defining the speech test material for intelligibility tests as well as analyzing and interpreting test results.

In this chapter as well, linguistic questions on the measuring object speech are considered, but from a different standpoint. Up to now, perceived form characteristics of the measuring object with regard to their ability to carry content were to the fore: However, now the aspect of form-content does not play a role any more but focus lies exclusively on the form itself. The study deals with portraying form characteristics of content-neutral speech test material with regard to their perceptual similarity. Linguistic standpoints are certainly taken into consideration, however, solely regarding phonologic and phonotactic criteria of speech test material specifications. Additional...