Differences among sighted individuals and individuals with visual impairments in word intelligibility presented via synthetic and natural speech.
This study investigated word intelligibility among sighted individuals and individuals with visual impairments for both natural and synthetic speech. Both groups of participants performed significantly better when identifying words presented via natural speech. The results also demonstrated that individuals with visual impairments were more successful than their sighted peers in understanding words presented via synthetic speech, with experience being the most critical factor in identifying words for the participants with visual impairments. Finally, the findings show the correlation between intelligibility and key factors such as age and the overall use of text-to-speech systems.
University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece.
Konstantinos
K
Papadopoulos
Evangelia
E
Katemidou
Athanasios
A
Koutsoklenis
Eirini
E
Mouratidou
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D002648:Child; D003143:Communication Devices for People with Disabilities; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011571:Psychoacoustics; D013065:Speech Intelligibility; D014786:Vision Disorders / Q000523:psychology*; D055815:Young Adult