between HII galaxies and low-ionization nuclear emission-line regions (LINERs) and have no broad permitted lines (e.g. H$\alpha$) in their optical spectrum. There is therefore no firm optical spectroscopic evidence for AGN in these galaxies. Of these 169 galaxies, 32 were observed by the high resolution modules of the Infrared Spectrograph (IRS; Houck et al. 2004) onboard [*Spitzer*]{}.

Table 1 summarizes the basic properties of the galaxies in our sample. All targets are nearby, ranging in distance from 1.6 to 43.6 Mpc. The majority of galaxies are classified as HII galaxies; only 4 out of 32 are T2 objects. Figure 1 shows the distribution of Hubble types for the sample. Note that there are only 2 Sd and 1 Sdm galaxy in the sample and that the majority of galaxies are of Hubble type Sc and Sbc.

[![The distribution of Hubble types for the sample. The galaxies with \[NeV\] detections are indicated by the filled histogram (see Section 4 for details). Since the sensitivity of the observations varied across the sample, we also indicate with a downward arrow in Figure 1 the number of galaxies with \[NeV\] 14$\mu$m line sensitivity of 10$^{38}$ ergs s$^{-1}$or better. Although the sample size is too 