Word Intelligibility and Position in Sentence
Herbert Rubenstein, J. M. Pickett · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1957
There is evidence that the manner in which context is distributed affects its constraint on verbal responses. For example, it has been demonstrated that a bilaterally distributed context is most effective in reducing the number of acceptable meanings for a given word. Another investigation has shown that nouns are most predictable at the end of a sentence and least predictable at the beginning of a sentence. In these investigations the contexts were presented visually; the present experiment was undertaken to ascertain whether similar results would be obtained with speech presented against a background of noise. Complete declarative sentences, all of the same length, were constructed in pairs; e.g., for each sentence containing the test noun in initial position, there was a semantically equivalent sentence made up of the same words but with the test noun in medial or final position. The members of a pair were presented at different experimental sessions in such a way that each experimental condition was equally represented at each session. The results indicate that, when the signal is compressed so that all words are approximately equal in intensity, intelligibility is lowest in initial position and highest in final position.