Intelligibility and acceptability of time-compressed utterances: an experimental study with blind and sighted listeners

Abstract

This paper reports an experimental study on the impact of time-compressed speech on acceptability and intelligibility of utterances in Brazilian Portuguese. For the experiments, short audio sentences containing warning messages were used as stimuli. These sentences were recorded in a natural speech rate and then digitally manipulated to faster rates in a scalar fashion (from 9 to 19 syllables per second). Intelligibility and acceptability tests were then conducted with blind and sighted subjects. The results indicate that time-compressed speech has a significant impact on both acceptability and intelligibility of utterances for both groups of participants and that while blind subjects tended to give slightly higher acceptability rates across all speech rate conditions, sighted subjects performed better in the intelligibility experiment, what contradicts a trend that is often reported in the literature