“…A possible limitation of the random selection procedure is that the phonemic distribution of the selected set may differ from that of the original matrix. Even though the validity of phonemic balancing as a design criterion for speech tests has been debated ( Martin, Champlin, & Perez, 2000 ; Wang, Mannell, Newall, Zhang, & Han, 2007 ) and some authors have abandoned phonemic balancing in developing speech materials ( Harris et al., 2007 ; Kirk, Pisoni, & Osberger, 1995 ; Nissen, Harris, Jennings, Eggett, & Buck, 2005 ), recent matrix tests in other languages were all developed to be phonemically balanced. Regardless of the validity of phonemic balanced speech materials, for the current optimization it is important that the differences between subset-based sampling and the original matrix test with respect to the phonemic distributions remain relatively small.…”