Identification of visual displays of speech: Comparisons of naive and trained observers

Abstract

Two groups of subjects were presented with spectrograms of 50 words they had never seen before and were asked to provide a single monosyllabic English word for each spectrogram. One group had learned to identify a limited set of speech spectrograms after 15 h of training using a study‐test procedure which stressed wholistic word identification. A subgroup of participants in a formal course on spectrogram reading at MIT served as a second group of subjects. These subjects learned specific acoustic and phonetic principles and strategies for interpreting spectrograms. Subjects in the first group correctly identified 33% of the possible phonetic segments in spectrograms they had never seen before. The second group of subjects correctly identified 40% of the possible segments in the same set of spectrograms given to the first group. When the data were scored for correct manner class of consonants only, the two groups did not differ significantly. Detailed descriptions of the identification results will be presented. Implications of these findings for developing visual aids for hearing impaired persons and improved phonetic recognition strategies will be discussed. [Supported by NSF.]