ISCA Archive - The importance of spectral quality of vowels for the intelligibility of sentences
ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1991
ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1991

The importance of spectral quality of vowels for the intelligibility of sentences

Gitta P. M. Laan, Dick R. van Bergem, Fiorien J. Koopmans-van Beinum

The intelligibility of Dutch sentences in which specific vowels were systematically replaced by the Dutch vowel /oe/ was tested. The prosodic features of the vowels were copied to their substitute by using the TD-PSOLA technique. Plausibility of the sentences appeared to be the predominant factor in this experiment. Word frequency had only a small effect. For function words the number of correct responses was higher than for content words. A word stress effect could not be demonstrated.