Younger and older adults' rate performance when listening to synthetic speech

Effects of Speech Rate, Background Noise, and Simulated Hearing Loss on Speech Rate Judgment and Speech Intelligibility in Young Listeners

“…In agreement with previous research, speech rates that were judged as being the ''preferred'' rates by the participants in the present study fell between 162 and 210 wpm for all noise and hearing conditions (Foulke and Sticht, 1966;Cain and Lass, 1974;Lass and Fultz, 1976;Riensche et al, 1979;Sutton et al, 1995;Wingfield and Ducharme, 1999). For each speech rate, there were no significant differences in the judgments within any of the noise or hearing conditions.…”

“…The judgment of speech rate appears to be a central task that is not affected by the peripheral masker used in the present study (Leeper and Thomas, 1978;Sutton et al, 1995;Wingfield and Ducharme, 1999;Gordon-Salant and Fitzgibbons, 2004). Previous research suggested that the judgment of speech rate is affected by the addition of reverberation to the speech signal, and this may be due to the effect that reverberation has on this central task (Moore et al, 2007).…”

Age Differences in Identifying Words in Synthetic Speech

“…One half of the audio files were sampled at 22050 Hz with 8 bits per sample in mono presentation mode using the default voice personality, and the presentation rate of each file was set at Festival's  default speech rate. This corresponded to roughly 210 wpm, which is within the recommended range of comfortable speech rates for young and older adults (Reynolds & Givens, 2001;Sutton, King, Hux, & Beukelman, 1995). For the other half of the audio files, we reduced the duration parameter of Festival  from 1.0 to 1.5, holding other parameters constant.…”

“…For the other half of the audio files, we reduced the duration parameter of Festival  from 1.0 to 1.5, holding other parameters constant. The new speech rate of 1.5 corresponded to approximately 150 wpm, which has been shown to be a preferred speaking rate by older adults (Sutton et al, 1995). Additionally, the decibel level of all files ranged from 65 to 75 dB.…”

Can older people remember medication reminders presented using synthetic speech?

“…13 Older people find synthetic speech more difficult to understand than younger people. 14,15 However, most related work [14][15][16][17][18][19] has focused on older speech synthesis technology and may therefore overestimate intelligibility problems. Here, we used publicly available implementations of the two main current speech synthesis approaches, statistical parametric synthesis 20,21 and unit selection 22,23 (figure 1).…”