A Sensitivity Analysis of Two Standard Measures of Speech Intelligibility

The Diagnostic Rhyme Test (DRT) has gained wide acceptance as a performance measure of speech intelligibility. However, other intelligibility measures are more appropriate for evaluating voice-output devices when DRT scores are near maximum. We describe a CV-identification experiment in which judges are presented with consonant-vowel syllables and are asked to identify the consonants. The resulting data paralleled those of the Diagnostic Acceptability Measure (a test of subjective quality) more closely than those of the DRT, and discriminated between speech coding conditions that were not significantly different in the DRT.