Effects of repeated listening experiences on the perception of synthetic speech by individuals with mild-to-moderate intellectual disabilities

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine whether individuals with intellectual disabilities (n = 18) demonstrate improvement in the perception of synthetic speech as a result of repeated exposure to it. Specifically, effects of training on novel versus repeated stimuli produced by the ETI Eloquence™ speech synthesizer were analyzed. Results revealed that training and experimental task each played a significant (p values < 0.01) role in the perception of synthetic words and sentences. Further, there was an absence of significant effect (p > 0.01) for stimulus type (i.e., repeated versus novel) suggesting that individuals with intellectual disabilities are able to generalize their knowledge of the acoustic-phonetic properties of synthetic speech to novel stimuli. Data are also presented for typical participants to establish a benchmark condition for the newly developed Eloquence synthesizer.

Keywords:

• Synthetic speech
• Repeated exposure
• Intellectual disability
• Augmentative and alternative communication

Notes

This paper is partially based on a presentation at the Annual Conference of the American Speech Language Hearing Association, San Francisco, CA; and on a master's thesis completed by the second author under the supervision of the first author at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. This research investigation was supported in part by the seed grant awarded to the first author by the School of Allied Health, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center.