The purpose of this study was to develop the Polish sentence matrix test (PSMT) to measure intelligibility of speech presented against a background noise. The PSMT consists of five columns containing: 10 names, 10 verbs, 10 numerals, 10 adjectives, and 10 nouns. Since each word was available as a separate sound file, it was possible to generate different sentences by juxtaposing randomly selected words taken from respective columns. This approach allows 100,000 unique sentences of a fixed grammatical structure to be generated. The speech reception threshold (SRT), i.e. the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) providing 50% speech intelligibility and S(50), the slope of an intelligibility function at the SRT point, were shown to be -9.6 dB and 17.1 %/dB, respectively. Note that in this study dB is regarded as dB SNR, otherwise reference is given. PSMT was also evaluated using an adaptive 1-up/1-down staircase procedure in investigations with and without participation of an experimenter. No significant differences were shown for SRTs obtained in these investigations.

The aim of this study was to develop Polish sentence tests for accurate measuring of speech intelligibility in masking interfering noise. Two sets of sentence lists have been developed. The first set was composed of 25 lists and was used for sentence intelligibility scoring. The second set was composed of 22 lists and was used for word intelligibility scoring. The lists in each set have been phonemically and statistically balanced. The speech reception threshold (SRT) and slope of the psychometric function at the SRT point (S(50)) were determined in normal-hearing subjects. It was found that the mean SRT and mean list-specific S(50list) for the first set were equal to -6.1 dB and 25.5%/dB, respectively. The mean SRT and the mean list-specific S(50list) for the second set were:-7.5 dB and 20.8%/dB. Due to a relatively steep slope of the psychometric functions, the Polish sentence tests were shown to be accurate materials for speech intelligibility measurements against interfering noise. They are the first sentence speech-in-noise tests developed for Slavonic languages.

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The paper describes three Polish tests for assessment of speech intelligibility under noisy conditions: the matrix test, the sentence test and the digit triplet test. The matrix test contains semantically unpredictable sentences of fixed syntactical structures. This test is very useful for long-term intelligibility measurements and is applicable for subjects with profound hearing loss or cochlear implants users. The sentence test comprises utterances taken from everyday speech and aims at clinical speech intelligibility measurements. The digit triplet test contains sequences of three digits that are spoken separately and is aimed at screening measurements, especially via telephone. The statistical and phonemic properties of the tests are analyzed and compared. The correlation between results obtained in the respective tests and the tests applicability are also discussed.