Comprehension of fluent synthetic speech produced by rule

Recent research presented to the Society by Feustel, Luce, and Pisoni [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 70, S98 (1981)] showed that recall of synthetic word lists under conditions of increased stress on short‐term memory is consistently poorer than recall of natural word lists. In an attempt to extend these findings to the perception and comprehension of continuous synthetic speech, we carried out an experiment in which subjects were presented short meaningful passages of fluent synthetic or natural speech. After presentation of each passage, the subjects were required to answer questions keyed to various levels of linguistic information represented in the passages. The results showed that the synthetically produced passages forced subjects to attend more closely to the physical properties of the speech signal itself. These findings indicate that synthetic speech places increased demands on the cognitive processes involved in comprehension and understanding of meaningful connected speech. [Work supported by g...