Articulation Testing at High Speech Rates
D. D’Eustachio, I. D'Eustachio · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1961
At the October 1960 meeting of the Acoustical Society of America we reported that articulation scores are a function of the rate at which material is presented to the listeners. The phonetic alphabet used was not designed for fast writing, and the listeners had difficulty transcribing at rates faster than 30 CVC syllables a minute. In an attempt to reach normal speech rates (six non-redundant speech sounds a second) a new testing crew has been trained, using an improved alphabet. Rates exceeding 50 CVC syllables a minute have been possible. The scores continue to fall as the rate increases. It also has been observed that the test becomes more discriminating as the rate increases. For example, in comparing a high quality speaker (lent to us by Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc.) with live speech, scores are alike at 40 syllables a minute but show a significant difference in favor of live speech at 50 syllables a minute. Also, at the high rates absolute performance but not relative performance appears to depend critically on training. Training techniques will be discussed.