Objective Evaluation of Consonant-Vowel pairs produced by Native Speakers of Danish

Nonsense syllable speech materials are often used when investigating speech perception in quiet and under adverse conditions. The main advantage of using nonsense syllables over words and sentences is that the acoustic as well as the linguistic context is minimal. This paper presents three anechoic recordings of 13 male and 13 female native talkers of Danish each speaking 65 nonsense syllables repeated three times with the neutral intonation contour for Danish (in total 15210 syllables). The authors compared and ranked groups of three recordings. These three recording had the same talker and had identical phonetic content. The syllables were ranked according to the general “appropriateness” and consistency, i.e., prototypical production of the consonant-vowel (CV) with respect to applicability in speech perceptual studies. The results were compared to results of an automatic method based on acoustic measures. The two novel ideas are 1) to devise an automated method for evaluating “appropriateness” of CVs and 2) to develop a Danish CV-material annotated with an objective measure of “appropriateness” for each recorded CV. The latter would potentially render more CV’s appropriate for perceptual studies. Moreover, objective evaluation would make it possible to examine any perceptual effects of variability in CV production (for example how susceptible different renderings by the same talker of CV’s are to background noise). To the knowledge of the authors, no such material has yet been published for any language.