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Multimodal Human-Robot Interaction from the Perspective of a Speech Scientist Read chapter Read first chapter

2015 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

The Role of Prosody in the Perception of Synthesized and Natural Speech

Authors : Maja Marković, Bojana Jakovljević, Tanja Milićev, Nataša Miliević

Published in: Speech and Computer

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

This paper presents the results of research of perception of synthesized and natural speech, and investigates the role of the prosodic characteristic of pauses in the process of speech comprehension. The research involved a series of perception tasks, including quality assessment, an intelligibility task and comprehension tests of ten shorter and one longer text in Serbian produced by the AlfaNum speech synthesizer and a professional actor, and a follow-up comprehension task of synthesized speech with modified pauses. The results of the intelligibility task show similar performance by both groups of subjects, while the comprehensibility tasks indicate better performance for natural than for synthesized speech. The results of the follow-up task show that the modified prosody contributed to the better performance of the subjects. The quality assessment task revealed the subjects preference for natural speech mainly on the basis of the prosodic characteristic of pauses.

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previous chapter The Multi-level Approach to Speech Corpora Annotation for Automatic Speech Recognition
next chapter The Singular Estimation Pitch Tracker
Footnotes
1
Pauses in the form of silence are not the only significant indicators of IP boundaries; the other common cues of IP boundaries are the lengthening of final segments (pre-boundary lengthening) and the presence of a specific boundary tone.
 
2
The results will be reported in detail in Sect. 3.
 
3
SUS is the methodology proposed as the most appropriate for assessing segmental intelligibility in [6] and references therein.
 
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Metadata
Title
The Role of Prosody in the Perception of Synthesized and Natural Speech
Authors
Maja Marković
Bojana Jakovljević
Tanja Milićev
Nataša Miliević
Copyright Year
2015
Book
Speech and Computer

Print ISBN: 978-3-319-23131-0

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-23132-7

Copyright Year: 2015

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23132-7_55

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