UCL LUNCH HOUR LECTURES

Professor Valerie Hazan (UCL Speech Hearing an Phonetic Sciences)

The ability to speak clearly is a definite advantage in many situations, such as when interacting with foreign speakers or individuals with a hearing loss. Some individuals seem to be inherently clearer than others, and we are all able to ‘clarify’ our speech when speaking to young children. However, elucidating what exactly makes a speaker easy to understand is not a trivial matter. I will present some recent work which has addressed this question and will consider whether it is possible to make a speaker clearer by electronically manipulating their speech.