Social Information in Written Standard Sentence Materials: Methods and Data
Alayo Tripp, Abbey E. Hammell, Benjamin Munson · University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy (University of Minnesota) · 2019
[From the under-consideration paper, authored by Tripp & Munson]: The Harvard/IEEE (henceforth H/I) sentences are widely used for testing speech recognition in English. This study examined whether two talker characteristics, race and gender, are conveyed by 80 of the H/I sentences in their written form, and by a comparison set of sentences from the internet message board Reddit, which were expected to convey social information. As predicted, a significant proportion of raters reported perceiving race and gender information in the H/I sentences. Suggestions of how to manage the potential influence of this social information on measures of speech intelligibility are provided. This archive includes the raw data from this paper, and the code used to generate the experiment in Qualtrics. The later of these was programmed by Abbey Hammell.