Discrimination and Perception of the Acoustic Rendition of Texts by Blind People

Abstract

Abstract. This paper reports on the results from a series of psychoacoustic experiments in the field of the auditory representation of texts via synthetic speech which comprise similar acoustic patterns so called "paronyms". The errors which occur when listening to paronyms are classified as errors of phonological type. Thirty blind and thirty sighted students participated in psychoacoustic experiments. The results from the experiments depicted the types of the subjects' errors and addressed comparisons between the performances of blind and sighted students on their auditory distinctions towards the chosen scripts (paronym words and sentences with paronyms). The discussion considered the practical implications of the findings such as issues regarding education as well as the development of suitable design of acoustic rendition of texts in favor of better perception and comprehension.

Differences Among Sighted Individuals and Individuals with Visual Impairments in Word Intelligibility Presented via Synthetic and Natural Speech

“…In a series of psychoacoustic experiments using similar acoustic patterns, the results for DEMOSTHe´NES ranged from 94.5% to 96.47% correct responses for sighted users and users with visual impairments, respectively, in single word tasks; and from 97.5% to 98.1% correct responses for sighted users and users with visual impairments, respectively, in single sentence tasks (Argyropoulos, Papadopoulos, Kouroupetroglou, Xydas, & Katsoulis, 2007). These results are comparable to results for the DECtalk for two reasons: (a) substantial data exist on the intelligibility of the DECtalk TTS system (von Berg, Panorska, Uken, & Qeadan, 2009), and (b) DECtalk is one of the most widely used TTS speech synthesizers in the AAC field (Koul & Hester, 2006;von Berg et al, 2009).…”

Discrimination and Comprehension of Synthetic Speech by Students with Visual Impairments: The Case of Similar Acoustic Patterns

“…The hypotheses of this study relied on the performance of the two groups of students on the tasks of recognizing the paronyms in specific auditory scripts. The structure of Experiment 1 was also used in another study with different participants with visual impairments (Argyropoulos, Papadopoulos, Kouroupetroglou, Xydas, & Katsoulis, 2007).…”

“…All the students' answers were audiotaped, transcribed, organized, reviewed for errors, and analyzed using SPSS 14.0. The categorization of the students' errors regarding paronyms was based on phoneme error patterns (see also Argyropoulos et al, 2007). The phoneme error pattern used in this study consisted of categories of phonological types.…”