| One of the factors that has been demonstrated to influence the understandability of speech is the speaker's use of prosody to mark stress and syntactic boundaries. Modelling speech understanding as a process which uses limited resources, particularly short-term memory, leads to the expectation that prosody aids in speech understanding by reducing the demand on these resources. In particular, marking of prominence and the identification of given and new information can reduce the difficulty of searching for words to match the received acoustic signal, while marking of syntactic boundaries can reduce the difficulty of parsing of an utterance. This leads to the expectation that the strength of these marks would affect the understandability of speech. Other factors, such as the listener knowing the characteristics of a voice in advance, could also affect the understandability of that voice. Although the results of an experiment to test these expectations only conclusively demonstrated a few of them, the results tend to support these expectations. |
