The role of prosody in the perception of synthesized and natural speech

Abstract

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015. 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.