COGNITIVE-FACTORS IN THE EVALUATION OF SYNTHETIC SPEECH

This paper illustrates the importance of various cognitive factors inv olved in perceiving and comprehending synthetic speech. It includes fi ndings drawn from the relative psychological and psycholinguistic lite rature together with experimental results obtained at the Fondazione U go Bordoni laboratory. Overall, it is shown that listening to and comp rehending synthetic voices is more difficult than with a natural voice . However, and more importantly, this difficulty can and does decrease with the subjects' exposure to said synthetic voices, Furthermore, gr eater workload demands are associated with synthetic speech and subjec ts listening to synthetic passages are required to pay more attention than those listening to natural passages. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B. V. All rights reserved.