The Impact of Synthetic and Accented Speech on Unattended Recall in a Dichotic Listening Task

Abstract

Synthetic speech is a commonly used form of computer-generated speech. Synthetic speech is different than natural speech as it has a different pacing and lacks intonation. English natural speech with a foreign accent also has a different pacing and pronunciation than an American’s own natural accented speech. A study was performed to determine if unattended synthetic speech was more difficult to process than unattended natural speech when one is engaged in an activity that demands a great deal of attention. Participants engaged in a dichotic listening task where they wore headphones and repeated information from one ear (attended), while ignoring information from their other ear (unattended). It was found that the presence of natural speech in the unattended ear resulted in participants reporting more low-threshold information from the task, and that accent did not impact the amount reported. It was concluded that synthetic speech is inherently different than natural speech, as degrading the natural speech by including a foreign accent did not result in the same deficits as synthetic speech.