Analysis of preferred speaking rate and pause in spoken easy Japanese for non-native listeners

Abstract

Abstract:We investigate the effect of speaking rate and pauses on the perception of spoken Easy Japanese, which is Japanese language with mostly easy words to facilitate understanding by non-native speakers. In this research, we used synthetic speech with various speaking rates, pause positions, and pause lengths to investigate how they correlate with the perception of Easy Japanese for non-native speakers of Japanese. We found that speech rates of 320 and 360 morae per minute are perceived to be close to the ideal speaking rate. Inserting pauses in natural places for Japanese native speakers, based on the dependency relation rule of Japanese, makes sentences easier to listen to for non-native speakers as well, whereas inserting too many pauses makes the sentences hard to listen to.

Effects of Artificial Synthetic Speech Control of SNR and Speech Rate on the Intelligibility of Train Station Announcements

“…They are listed in the Barrier-Free Improvement Guidelines of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport [38] as places where acoustic facilities should be provided at railway stations, and noise level surveys have been conducted for both locations [39]. Previous studies [2,32,33] have also reported appropriate guidelines for the speech rate of announcements in public spaces in Japan. In order to investigate the effects of SNR and speech rate on auditory impression separately, the appropriate SNR range was first found by setting the speech rate considered appropriate beforehand, that is, without considering the acoustic characteristics of the space.…”

“…The various conditions of the information broadcasts created are shown in Table 1. The speech rate was set to 7 mora/s with reference to previous studies [2,32,33] and HOYA broadcasts. Additionally, the words (station name, destination name, line number, train type, number of cars, etc.)…”

“…However, in practice, the effectiveness of synthetic voice for use in stations has not been verified. For example, Tachibana [24] emphasized the importance of speech intelligibility in noisy environments, and there have been many studies on the optimal volume and speech rate of broadcasts in public spaces such as airports and train stations [1,2,24] and under high noise levels [25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33]. However, it is difficult to immediately apply these findings to the environments in train stations because the acoustic characteristics of the sound environment can differ depending on the location.…”

“…Indeed, many measurements of noise levels in railway stations have already been carried out [34,35], and Bandyopadhyay et al [36] suggested that the sound pressure levels (SPLs) of BGN and loudspeaker sound on the platform can cause significant discomfort to users, as they are largely above acceptable daytime noise levels. Furthermore, although the Architectural Institute of Japan Environmental Standard [37] sets a speech rate of 5.5 mora/s, which is derived from the results of a study using broadcasts at this rate, there are many other studies that mention the possibility that the comprehensibility of information broadcasts may change depending on the speech rate [2,32,33]. Under these circumstances, the development of clear voice transmission that is efficient and does not cause discomfort in the sound environment of station premises is essential.…”

Speaking-Rate-Controllable HiFi-GAN Using Feature Interpolation

“…Table 1 lists the exact speaking rate measured by mora per second. This was computed by dividing the mora number by the voiced length of each utterance [5,35]. The voiced frames were detected by using voice activity detection 6 .…”