Stephen D. Voran

Abstract: We present an objective estimator of speech intelligibility that follows the paradigm of the Modified Rhyme Test (MRT). For each input, the estimator uses temporal correlations within articulation index bands to select one of six possible words from a list. The rate of successful word identification becomes the measure of speech intelligibility, as in the MRT. The estimator is called Articulation Band Correlation MRT (ABC-MRT). It consumes a tiny fraction of the resources required by MRT testing. ABC-MRT has been tested on a wide range of impaired speech recordings unseen during development. The resulting Pearson correlations between ABC-MRT and MRT results range from .95 to .99. These values exceed those of the other estimators tested.

Keywords: modified rhyme test (MRT); speech intelligibility; ABC-MRT; articulation index; objective estimator

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