The effect of learning on listening to ultra-Fast speech

Abstract

We investigated the intelligibility of ultrafast speech which may be used for screen reader for persons with visual disability. The subjects were 35 women who are university students and are not visually/hearing impaired. They were divided into four groups and they listened to 150 words with the speed of approximately 20 morae/s. The vocabulary contained the tasks of high and low familiarity words, and the orders of tasks were different by the groups. Four morae Japanese words from the FW03 database were used as the vocabulary of the recall test. As a result, significant learning effect was observed in cases where the subject listened the high familiarity words in succession. This indicates that the learning effect to the ultrafast speech is promoted when the mental lexical access is easy. We also investigated the mental workloads of the listening task using the NASA-TLX method. As the results, significantly high workload scores were observed at the listening of low familiarity words. The results also suggested that the mental workload decreases when the subject was aware that the mental lexical access was difficult.