Danish Sentence Test (DAST) Sentences

A typical speech-in-noise experiment in a research and development setting can easily contain as many as 20 conditions, or even more, and often requires at least two test points per condition. A sentence test with enough sentences to make this amount of testing possible without repetition does not yet exist in Danish. Thus, a new corpus, the Danish Sentence Test (DAST) corpus, has been developed to facilitate the creation of a sentence test that is large enough to address this need. While these kinds of corpora are often created with a specific test in mind and thereby published jointly, this corpus has been designed to facilitate the creation of several application-specific tests, and therefore, the corpus is described independently from the associated tests that will follow. The corpus itself is made up of audio and audio-visual recordings of 1200 linguistically balanced sentences, all of which are spoken by two female and two male talkers. The sentences were constructed using a novel, template-based method that facilitated control over both word frequency and sentence structure. The sentences were evaluated linguistically in terms of phonemic distributions, naturalness, and connotation, and thereafter, recorded, post-processed, and rated on their audio, visual, and pronunciation qualities. Green screen versions of the visual material can be made available upon request. Additional details are contained in the associated publications.