Extract from Mara Mills in Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality ​​: “An example of a speech-hearing test based on ‘phonetically balanced’ (PB) lists of common monosyllabic words, representing the English speech sounds in proportion to their relative frequencies of use. Originally created at the Harvard Psychoacoustic Laboratory after World War II, the PB test lists were updated in the 1950s by Ira Hirsh and colleagues at the Central Institute for the Deaf (CID). The new 12-inch disc recordings, known as Auditory Test No. W-22, were widely marketed to audiologists by the CID. They remain among the most common English-language speech hearing tests today, despite the impossibility of capturing ‘average’ English speech (across speakers, dialects, and so on), and despite evidence that phonetic balance is not even necessary to test word recognition.“