Comprehension of natural and synthetic speech using a sentence verification task
Laura M. Manous, David B. Pisoni, Michael J. Dedina, Howard C. Nusbaum · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1986
A verification task was used to study sentence comprehension using two natural voices and five different synthetic voices generated by automatic text-to-speech conversion. Subjects listened to true and false, three- and six-word sentence produced by one of these voices. Sentence verification accuracy and speed, and sentence transcription accuracy were measured. A significant effect of voice type was obtained for true and false sentences for all three measures. In addition, for false sentences, subjects were less accurate in transcribing six-word sentences and they were slower in verifying these sentences. Furthermore, there were significant interactions of voice type with sentence length for all three dependent measures. Verification speed revealed a clustering of the seven voices into three basic categories corresponding to: (1) natural speech, (2) high-quality synthetic speech, and (3) moderate- to low-quality synthetic speech. Results from a second sentence verification task used to investigate effects of sentence predictability will also be discussed. [Work supported by AFOSR and NIH.]