Acoustic-phonetic characteristics of hyperarticulated speech for different speaking styles

This study aims to describe differences between hyperarticulated and normal speech. Hyperarticulated, or clear speech is produced when addressing to hearing-impaired listeners. It also appears quite often in spoken language systems as the user's reaction on previous recognition errors. We present a comparison of the acoustic-phonetic characteristics of normal and hyperarticulated speech for three different types of utterances, single words, single sentences and spontaneous speech. Duration, fundamental frequency, formants and formant bandwidths change significantly. Significant differences between the three speaking styles are observable, especially for spontaneous speech vs. words and sentences. We report on an auditory test investigating the perceived changes in the two speech types.