Speech recognition performance on a modified nonsense syllable test.

ABSTRACT

A modification of the City University of New York nonsense syllable test (CUNY NST) has been developed in which (a) the several subtests of the original test are replaced with a 22-item consonant-vowel (CV) subtest and a 16-item vowel-consonant (VC) subtest; and, (b) the response choices for each target syllable include all 22 initial and all 16 final consonants, respectively. In addition, the test tokens are presented as isolated syllables without a carrier phrase. These changes enable the resolution of confusions not possible on the original NST, and also the construction of a single confusion matrix each for CVs and VCs, respectively. The modified nonsense syllable test (MNST) provides results that compare favorably to those of the original NST.