Children's perception of synthetic speech produced by rule

Abstract

Several experiments examined the perception of synthetic speech by school‐age children ranging in age from 5‐ to 11‐years old. These tasks all used synthetic speech produced by commercially available text‐to‐speech systems. In tasks involving free and ordered recall of lists of words, 8‐year‐old children recalled naturally produced items better than synthetically produced items even when the items were equated for familiarity and intelligibility. Other tasks included children's responses to spoken commands and sentence recall using meaningful and semantically anomalous sentences. As in our previous studies, performance was better for natural speech than synthetic speech, paralleling the general findings obtained with adults in our earlier studies. Synthetic speech, even when the speech is highly intelligible, may interact with task requirements to produce significant decrements in performance when children engage in complex cognitive tasks. [Supported by NINCDS.]