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This study was conducted to examine the differential effects upon vowel intelligibility of various degrees of time compression (TC) and frequency division (FD), with and without time restoration. A male speaker and a female speaker were used. For a given percentage of distortion, FD degrades vowel intelligibility more severely than TC. Restoring time to normal for FD speech produced by slow playing via the Fairbanks speech compressor does not enhance intelligibility. Vowel confusions under TC are related to duration; those for FD conditions appear to be closely related to the perception of Vowel Formant 2 and to a lesser degree, Vowel Formant 1. Patterns of male and female vowel confusions are generally much alike for all conditions and types of distortion. Results tentatively indicate superior female vowel intelligibility under all conditions of distortion, the advantage being largest for FD, somewhat less for TC. These results suggest that over a limited range of frequency division (up to 40%), vowel phonemic quality is relatively unaffected by proportionate shifting of fundamental frequency and formant structure, indicating that a "relativevowel" hypothesis of vowel phonemic quality may hold for limited shifts in the frequency of vowel spectra. I. PROBLEM HE purpose of this study was to examine the effects of time compression (TC) and frequency division (FD) with (FD-TD) and without (FD-TR) time distortion upon vowel intelligibility. Much previous work with FD (Ochai, Saito, and Sakai, x Klumpp and Webster, •' Tiffany andBennett 3) has been limited by the fact that FD provided by slow-playing speech distorts time relationships. Use of the speech compression device built and described by Fairbanks, Everitt, and Jaeger 4 permits the restoration of FD speech to normal time (FD-TR) as was done by

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Forty normal college students rated the difficulty of listening to samples of speech subjected to 20, 30, 40, and 50% time compression compared with a standard consisting of normal speech. A male and female speaker were used. Results indicate that difficulty commences to increase and accelerate beyond 20% time compression to reach a value of about five times as difficult at 50% time compression. The male’s speech was increasingly less difficult to listen to than the female’s speech as the degree of time compression increased.

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