Cognitive factors in the evaluation of synthetic speech

This paper illustrates the importance of various cognitive factors involved in perceiving and comprehending synthetic speech. It includes findings drawn from the relative psychological and psycholinguistic literature together with experimental results obtained at the Fondazione Ugo Bordoni laboratory. Overall, it is shown that listening to and comprehending synthetic voices is more difficult than with a natural voice. However, and more importantly, this difficulty can and does decrease with the subjects' exposure to said synthetic voices, Furthermore, greater workload demands are associated with synthetic speech and subjects listening to synthetic passages are required to pay more attention than those listening to natural passages. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.