Comparison across languages using the multilingual Matrix Test: Which language is best to survive in a cocktail party?

Abstract

The Matrix test (i.e., sentence test with fixed syntactic structure, but ten alternative words in each position which may lead to nonsense utterances) has the potential to overcome the inherently language-dependent incompatibilities of speech audiology. It is meanwhile available (with varying degree of supportive data) in Swedish, German, Danish, Dutch, American English, British English, French, Polish, Turkish, Spanish, Italian, Persian, Arabian, Finnish, and Russian. Several measures have been taken to make the tests as efficient, reliable and comparable across different languages as possible and to establish a de-facto standard. Using the Matrix concept it is also possible to estimate the “communication efficiency” of the different languages for this kind of sentences against each other. To eliminate the influence of the individual speaker, recordings with accent-free bilingual speakers (German-Russian and German-Spanish) were used to assess the respective speech reception threshold (SRT) for native listeners using stationary and fluctuating background noise. The results show both an inter-speaker and inter-language effect in the order of 3 dB. The latter is larger between German and Spanish than between German and Russian. The origin of these effects (such as long-term speech spectrum and the relative information content of consonants and vowels) will be discussed.