Linguistic Considerations in the Study of Speech Intelligibility
Ilse Lehiste, Gordon E. Peterson · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1959
Intelligibility is defined as a property of speech communication involving meaning. Since only meaningful units have normal linguistic distributional properties, only meaningful units have the phonetic properties of actual speech. An auditory intelligibility dialect ratio is defined for a listener relative to a specified message. An analysis is presented of the Harvard PB lists, and a set of 10 lists of 50 monosyllables each is presented having an almost exact first-order phonemic balancing.