Validity and sensitivity of the EuropeanPortuguese phonetically balanced text “O Sol” (The Sun)

Abstract

Validation of data collection and analysis’ instruments of adult speech production is an emerging and pertinent research area due to the increase aging rate and motor speech disorders. The objectives of this study were to verify if the phonetically balanced text (PBT) “O Sol” (The Sun) contains the same phoneme occurrence frequency of the corpus PF_fone and FrePOP and determine the sensitivity of the PBT “O Sol” for the European-Portuguese (EP) dialectal variations. 55 subjects norm-speakers, with an age mean of 29 yrs and a range between [18-58] yrs, read aloud the PBT “O Sol” and were recorded with a Sony PCM-D50 Linear DAT recorder (96kHz/24bit). The phone relative frequency (Fr) of the PBT “O Sol” was compared with the Fr of the two reference corpus. The phone absolute frequency (Fa) of the PBT “O Sol” was calculated and compared among EP dialects. 30 of the 38 phones of the PBT “O Sol” presented a Fr equal to or above the acceptance threshold. Six of 38 phones presented significantly different Fa amounts for the three EP dialects (p<.05). In conclusion, the PBT “O Sol” presented 78.9 % of EP phones with a Fr similar to the spontaneous speech. Its content, construction and concurrent validity was verified. Lastly, the PBT “O Sol” can be applied to any EP speaking dialects due to its sensitivity to these variations.