Purpose As factors influencing human word perception are important in the construction of speech perception tests used within the speech and hearing sciences, the purposes of this study were as follows: first, to develop algorithms that can be used to calculate different types of word metrics that influence the speed and accuracy of word perception and, second, to create a database in which those word metrics were calculated for a large set of Swedish words. Method Based on a revision of a large Swedish phonetic dictionary, data and algorithms were developed by which various frequency metrics, word length metrics, semantic metrics, neighborhood metrics, phonotactic metrics, and orthographic transparency metrics were calculated for each word in the dictionary. Of the various word metric algorithms used, some were Swedish language reimplementations of previously published algorithms, and some were developed in this study. Results The results of this study have been gathered in a Swedish word metric database called the AFC-list . The AFC-list consists of 816,404 phonetically transcribed Swedish words, all supplied with the word metric data calculated. The full AFC-list has been made publicly available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Conclusion The results of this study constitute an extensive linguistic resource for the process of selecting test items in new well-controlled speech perception tests in the Swedish language. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.8330009

The speech perception ability of people with hearing loss can be efficiently measured using phonemic-level scoring. We aimed to develop linguistic stimuli suitable for a closed-set phonemic discrimination test in the Swedish language called the Situated Phoneme (SiP) test. The SiP test stimuli that we developed consisted of real monosyllabic words with minimal phonemic contrast, realised by phonetically similar phones. The lexical and sublexical factors of word frequency, phonological neighbourhood density, phonotactic probability, and orthographic transparency were similar between all contrasting words. Each test word was recorded five times by two different speakers, including one male and one female. The accuracy of the test-word recordings was evaluated by 28 normal-hearing subjects in a listening experiment with a silent background using a closed-set design. With a few exceptions, all test words could be correctly discriminated. We discuss the results in terms of content- and construct-validity implications for the Swedish SiP test.

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