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

A Monosyllabic Test Corpus to Evaluate The Intelligibility of Synthesized and Natural Speech

Murray Spiegel, Mary Jo Altom, Marian Macchi, Karen Wallace

Bellcore, Morristown, NJ, USA; Department of Linguistics, New York University, New York, NY, USA

The consonant intelligibility of synthesized speech was tested using a monosyllabic corpus. It differs from those used in other tests in that it spans a wide variety of English sounds and is thus useful for diagnosis as well as for comparative evaluation. Some 'standard' tests of intelligibility use restricted phonetic material, which are easier to understand than a representative sample of English; thus, the results from those tests do not reflect the intelligibility of a wider sample of speech. For illustration, we present the results of a telephone comparison between Bellcore's demisyllable synthesizer, SPOKESMAN, a commercial synthesizer and natural speech obtained from 2 talkers.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Spiegel, Murray / Altom, Mary Jo / Macchi, Marian / Wallace, Karen (1989): "A monosyllabic test corpus to evaluate the intelligibility of synthesized and natural speech", In SIOA-1989, Vol.2, 5-10.