Speech Intelligibility of Native and Non-Native Speech

Abstract

The intelligibility of speech is known to be lower if the talker is non-native instead of native for the given language. This study is aimed at quantifying the overall degradation due to acoustic-phonetic limitations of non- native talkers of Dutch, specifically of Dutch-speaking Americans who have lived in the Netherlands 1-3 years. Experiments were performed using phoneme intelligibility and sentence intelligibility tests, using additive noise as a means of degrading the intelligibility of speech utterances for test purposes. The overall difference in sentence intelligibility between native Dutch talkers and American talkers of Dutch, using native Dutch listeners, was found to correspond to a difference in speech-to-noise ratio of approximately 3 dB. The main contribution to the degradation of speech intelligibility by introducing non-native talkers and/or listeners, is by confusion of vowels, especially those that do not occur in American English.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Aug 01, 2000
Accession Number
ADP010387

Entities

People

  • Sander J. Van Wijngaarden

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Acoustics
  • Architectural Acoustics
  • Background Noise
  • Computers
  • Consonants
  • Dutch Language
  • Hearing Loss
  • Human Factors Engineering
  • Intelligibility
  • Language
  • Laptop Computers
  • Materials
  • Phonemes
  • Recognition
  • Speech
  • Standards
  • Word Recognition

Readers

  • European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP).
  • Speech Processing/Speech Recognition.