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Native talkers are able to enhance acoustic characteristics of their speech in a speaking style known as “clear speech,” which is better understood by listeners than “plain speech.” However, despite substantial research in the area of clear speech, it is less clear whether non-native talkers of various proficiency levels are able to adopt a clear speaking style and if so, whether this style has perceptual benefits for native listeners. In the present study, native English listeners evaluated plain and clear speech produced by three groups: native English talkers, non-native talkers with lower proficiency, and non-native talkers with higher proficiency. Listeners completed a transcription task (i.e., an objective measure of the speech intelligibility). We investigated intelligibility as a function of language background and proficiency and also investigated the acoustic modifications that are associated with these perceptual benefits. The results of the study suggest that both native and non-native talkers modulate their speech when asked to adopt a clear speaking style, but that the size of the acoustic modifications, as well as consequences of this speaking style for perception differ as a function of language background and language proficiency.
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Acoustic voice variation in spontaneous speech
This study replicates and extends the recent findings of Lee, Keating, and Kreiman [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 146(3), 1568–1579 (2019)] on acoustic voice variation in read speech, which showed remarkably similar acoustic voice spaces for groups of female and male talkers and the individual talkers within these groups. Principal component analysis was applied to acoustic indices of voice quality measured from phone conversations for 99/100 of the same talkers studied previously. The acoustic voice spaces derived from spontaneous speech are highly similar to those based on read speech, except that unlike read speech, variability in fundamental frequency accounted for significant acoustic variability. Implications of these findings for prototype models of speaker recognition and discrimination are considered.
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- PAR ID:
- 10367488
- Publisher / Repository:
- Acoustical Society of America (ASA)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
- Volume:
- 151
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 0001-4966
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 3462-3472
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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