Abstract:

Various acoustic--phonetic and listener--transcription analyses were conducted using materials from two large databases of recorded speech. The first database consisted of sentence-length materials spoken by 20 talkers, along with intelligibility data in the form of transcriptions by ten native English listeners per talker. Acoustic--phonetic analyses of the digitized speech samples showed that talkers who exhibited a high degree of ``articulatory precision'' had higher intelligibility scores than talkers who produced more ``reduced'' speech. The second database consisted of a set of words spoken by ten talkers at three speaking rates, along with transcriptions by native English listeners. Analyses of the transcription accuracy scores showed a strong effect of inherent lexical characteristics, and a strong effect of speaking rate. Furthermore, the difficulties imposed by one factor, such as a fast speaking rate or an inherently difficult lexical item, could be overcome by the advantage gained through the listener's experience with the speech of a particular talker. Taken together, these data provide important information regarding the separate and combined effects of talker-, listener-, and item-related factors on normal speech intelligibility.