Citation

Sadowski WJ. Proc. Hum. Factors Ergon. Soc. Annu. Meet. 2006; 50(5): 733-736.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2006, Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, Publisher SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/154193120605000525

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Verbal shadowing refers to a task whereby a person, while listening to a continuous message, repeats the message aloud word for word. Some research suggested that shadowed speech is distorted and unnatural, while others have reported shadowed speech as clearly intelligible and containing prosodic contour. This research used a different approach to investigate the naturalness and intelligibility of shadowed speech. Another goal of this research was to determine whether shadowed speech is sufficiently similar to read speech, regarding intelligibility and naturalness, such that it might be acceptable for training speech recognition systems. This paper focuses on the subjective evaluation of shadowed and read speech to quantifiably measure the perceived differences. The results indicated that humans can detect statistically significant differences between read and shadowed speech; however, the magnitude of the differences may not be sufficient to deter its use for training speech recognition systems.

Language: en