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Participants were able to use partly incorrect and delayed subtitles to increase their comprehension of speech in noise, regardless of age and hearing loss. This supports the further development and evaluation of an assistive listening system that displays automatically recognized speech to aid speech comprehension by listeners with hearing impairment.

In this article, we address the issue of using a continuous speech recognition tool to obtain phonetic or phonological representations of speech. Two experiments were carried out in which the performance of a continuous speech recognizer (CSR) was compared to the performance of expert listeners in a task of judging whether a number of prespecified phones had been realized in an utterance. In the first experiment, nine expert listeners and the CSR carried out exactly the same task: deciding whether a segment was present or not in 467 cases. In the second experiment, we expanded on the first experiment by focusing on two phonological processes: schwa-deletion and schwa-insertion. The results of these experiments show that significant differences in performance were found between the CSR and the listeners, but also between individual listeners. Although some of these differences appeared to be statistically significant, their magnitude is such that they may very well be acceptable depending on what the transcriptions are needed for. In other words, although the CSR is not infallible, it makes it possible to explore large datasets, which might outweigh the errors introduced by the mistakes the CSR makes. For these reasons, we can conclude that the CSR can be used instead of a listener to carry out this type of task: deciding whether a phone is present or not.

The general goal of our research is to develop a personal computer assistant that persuades children to adhere to a healthy lifestyle during daily activities at home. The assistant will be used in three different roles: as companion, educator and motivator. This study investigates whether the effectiveness of the computer assistant with an iCat robot embodiment, can be improved when it expresses emotions (tested for each of the three roles). It shows that emotion expressions can improve the effectiveness of the robot to achieve its role objectives. The improvements that we found are small, however, probably due to a ceiling effect: All subjective measures are rated very positively in the neutral condition, thus leaving little room for improvement. It also showed that the emotional speech was less intelligible, which may limit the robots' effectiveness.

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