Written standard sentence materials convey social information

The Harvard/IEEE (henceforth H/I) sentences are widely used for testing speech recognition in English. This study examined whether two talker characteristics, race and gender, are conveyed by 80 of the H/I sentences in their written form, and by a comparison set of sentences from the internet message board Reddit, which were expected to convey social information. As predicted, a significant proportion of raters reported perceiving race and gender information in the H/I sentences. Suggestions of how to manage the potential influence of this social information on measures of speech intelligibility are provided.