An Examination of the Impact of Synthetic Speech on Unattended Recall in a Dichotic Listening Task

摘要

Synthetic speech, which is generated by a computer, is widely used in both everyday situations (e.g. GPSdevices; weather alerts) and the military (e.g. aviation). Synthetic speech is not identical to spoken speech,as it has a different pacing and varying pronunciations. Participants engaged in a Dichotic Listening Task inwhich they actively repeated information that was being presented in one ear, while ignoring their other(unattended) ear. The task was adapted and used both synthetic and spoken speech in the attended andunattended ears. It was found that when the unattended information was Spoken participants were morelikely to hear an alert word (“fire”) and familiar character names when engaging in a difficult task. Whenunattended information was in the form of Synthetic Speech less of these low-threshold words werereported by the participants. This research has important implications for the development and use ofsynthetic speech in high workload situations, and in alerts.