Comprehension of natural and synthetic speech

Abstract

Previous studies comparing the comprehension of natural and synthetic speech passages have produced conflicting results. All of these studies used successive measurement techniques in which subjects' comprehension was assessed after the presentation of a passage. However, comparative studies have found that successive methods are less sensitive than simultaneous “on‐line” measures. Successive measures are also known to be influenced by memory factors. Subjects in the present experiment monitored for word targets while they listened to short passages and then verified statements after each passage. Both monitoring and verification performance for passages of synthetic speech were depressed relative to passages of natural speech. There was a significant interaction between voice and text difficulty in the monitoring latency data, suggesting that both factors affect mechanisms drawing from the same limited processing resources. Finally, there was a significant interaction between voice and sentence type in t...