The impact of perceptual load on natural and synthetic speech perception
Adriana Ojeda, Ethan Kutlu, Ratree P. Wayland · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2018
Previous work has shown that the availability and the weighting of different types of information (e.g., lexical, segmental/subsegmental, and metrical prosody) for speech segmentation are gradiently affected by perceptual and cognitive load. Specifically, it has been shown that severe energetic masking increases reliance on the acoustic, sub-segmental, context-dependent coarticulation information and decreases reliance on lexical information (e.g., Mattys et al., 2009). In this study, the effects of energetic masking on the intelligibility of synthetic and natural speech (controlled for lexical and metrical prosody) will be compared. Since fine acoustic detail linked to coarticulation is lacking in synthetic speech in comparison to naturally produced speech, energetic masking should result in greater reliance on lexical information than coarticulatory information on synthetic speech processing while the opposite will be true for natural speech. Reference Mattys, S. L., Brooks, J., & Cooke, M. (2009). Recognizing speech under a processing load: Dissociating energetic from informational factors. Cognitive Psychology, 59, 203-243.