ESCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Speech Input/Output Assessment and Speech Databases Noordwijkerhout, The Netherlands September 20-23, 1989

The Assessment of Synthetic Speech Intelligibility Using Semantically Unpredictable Sentences

Valerie Hazan, Martine Grice

Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London, London, UK

The use of semantically unpredictable sentences was investigated as part of a standard test battery for the evaluation of synthetic speech within the ESPRIT SAM (Speech Assessment Methodology) project Such sentences were randomly generated using five syntactic structures and two word lists for each syntactic category differing according to word frequency of occurrence. A significant learning effect was observed. Frequency of occurrence of words also had a significant effect on their intelligibility.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Hazan, Valerie / Grice, Martine (1989): "The assessment of synthetic speech intelligibility using semantically unpredictable sentences", In SIOA-1989, Vol.2, 23-26.