Elaboration of a phonetically balanced corpus logatomos for evaluation of speech intelligibility in Spanish

Abstract

This study elaborates and evaluates a list of phonetically balanced logatoms to measure the speech intelligibility on Spanish language. The original list considers all the CVC sound combinations (logatoms of the form consonant + vowel + consonant), except in the neutralizations, where it is considered only one standard combination. For the evaluation, an articulation test was applied to ten university students through headphones. The results showed a 97,70% average of correctly transcribed logatoms and a 2,30% of logatoms with transcription errors, with a 1,51% on the first consonant, a 0,61% on the second one and a 0,18% on the vowel. A more detailed analysis revealed that the higher recurrent errors concentrate on the initial consonants, multiple vibrant /rr/ and the lateral palatal /ll/, and the final consonant nasal palatal /ñ/. This balance justified the elaboration of a new listing composed by 750 logatoms.