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Metrical structure and the perception of time-compressed speech.
Authors:
Young, D., Altmann, G.T.M., Cutler, A. & Norris, D.
Reference:
In Eurospeech '93: Proceedings of the 3rd European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (pp. 771-774), (Berlin, September, 1993).
Year of publication:
1993
CBU number:
3007
Abstract:
Speech perception was examined under conditions of time compression. The materials were 40 sentences for which the content words were either of the form strong-weak ("The question of capital punishment occupied the morning session"), or weak-strong ("The apprentice refused to resign or accept enforced redundancy"). These sentences were compressed to 35% of their original duration and presented to listeners who were asked to report the sentences' content. Intelligibility (defined as number of words correctly recognised) did not differ significantly across the strong-weak sentences versus the weak-strong sentences. Correlated with recognition performance were the plausibility of the sentence and the number of syllable sequences of the form "weak weak strong". A second study produced a negative correlation between intelligibility and the number of w-w-s sequences. It is concluded that intelligibility of time-compressed speech depends both on the plausibility of the sentence being recognised, and on a complex interplay between foot structure and isochrony.
