Bisyllabic words for speech audiometry: a new italian material

Bisyllabic words are the most frequently used italian speech material in evaluating intelligibility function. The italian words presently used are those proposed by Bocca and Pellegrini in 1950. The Lists of these words do, however, present some problems with regard to phonemic balance and word familiarity. In speech audiometry testing, Lists are considered interchangeable if each individual List has the same phonemic balance. So as to avoid incorrect identification due to incomprehension of infrequently used words, we chose 200 of the most familiar bisyllabic words from the most recent, widely used occurrence vocabulary of the Italian Language. Secondly, we proceeded with phonemic balance of the speech material. The selected words were divided into ten lists of 20 words each, arranged in order to obtain the best phonemic balance within each individual List and among different Lists. The differences between the new and old speech material are presented and discussed.