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Speaker Controlled Variability
Project Objectives |
Our research questions are as follows:
|
Within communicative situations, is speaker clarity linked to the internal structure of phonetic categories? |
Using a corpus collected using a technique aimed at eliciting conversational speech, measures of speaker intelligibility will be obtained for each of 40 speakers in perception experiments.
In Study 1, via acoustic-phonetic measurements of specific keywords, we will assess whether speaker clarity is associated with the degree of absolute acoustic-phonetic distance across phonetic categories, the degree of within-category consistency in production, or the degree of cross-category overlap.
| Across communicative situations, is speaker clarity linked to degree of adaptability to the perceptual needs of the listener? |
In Study 2, we will assess whether there is significant variability in the way that speakers adapt their speech in a task in which the perceptual needs of the listener are varied, i.e. when the other participant shares a common language, has a simulated hearing loss (degraded acoustic-phonetic signal) or is an L2 speaker (degraded language knowledge). We will also investigate whether inherently-clear speakers show a greater adaptation to the listener's needs.
| Is a speaker's inherent clarity consistent across speaking styles and speech materials? |
Previous studies of speaker variability have been based on single recordings of scripted speech. This type of speech lacks communicative intent and displays less variability than spontaneous speech (e.g. Meunier and Floccia, 1997).
In Study 1, we will assess whether relative speaker clarity within a group of 40 speakers is consistent across three types of speech materials: conversational speech, scripted connected speech (sentences) and scripted isolated words.
Page last modified on 17 jan 11 19:19 by Carolyne S Megan
