Some Effects of List Familiarity and Synthetic Segment Familiarity on the Intelligibility of PB Words Produced by Diphone Synthesis
N. Rex Dixon, H. D. Maxey, R. Aylsworth · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1965
In a previous paper [S. E. Estes, H. R. Kerby, H. D. Maxey, and R. M. Walker, “Speech Synthesis from Stored Data,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 34, 2003(A) (1962)], a method for unlimited vocabulary synthesis was presented and discussed. The method consists of computer assembly of digital data representing diphone-length segments, together with auxiliary data specifying intonation and timing, to produce synthetic speech. In order to evaluate the adequacy of this method of segmentation, intelligilibity tests have been conducted using PB words in a standard carrier phrase. The results of these studies have indicated that intelligibility scores on synthetically produced PB words are affected by at least two major factors: familiarity with the words under test and familiarity with the diphone components of the words. A study has been designed to test the effects of these two factors on the intelligibility scores of normal adult listeners in sound-field conditions. The stimuli used are selected C.I.D. W-22 lists. These results are presented and discussed.