Diagnostic Rhyme Test for the Evaluation of Communications Systems
Marion F. Cohen, J. Mickunas, Jared Miller, William D. Voiers · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1965
A test for consonant articulation has been developed to provide a practical method of system evaluation with respect to 7 “articulatory dimensions.” It utilizes a pool of 128 rhyming-word pairs, each designed to test for the transmission of a specific feature. Either word of each pair may serve as the stimulus. The listener's task is simply to identify which member of the pair has been spoken. Any number of equivalent forms of the test may be generated by randomly varying the stimulus word. Successive administration of two or more equivalent forms is feasible as a means of obtaining any desired degree of score reliability. Four administrations can be accomplished in 10 min. With a crew of 8 listeners, the standard errors of the various scores are of the order of one percentage point over the range from 80%–100% articulation. In addition to a gross score for each feature, subscores for false alarms and detection failures are readily obtained.