The effect of pause insertion on the intelligibility of Danish among Swedes
Scharpff & Van Heuven (1988) have shown that low-quality, synthetic speech is
better understood when pauses are inserted at prosodic boundaries. Their study
pertains to an L1 situation. In the present paper we test the hypothesis that the
positive effect of particular pauses on intelligibility within the same language
can be generalized to speech of an unknown but closely related language. We
presented long Danish sentences to Swedish listeners in two versions, one without
pauses and one with pauses at prosodic boundaries. The results showed that
the percentage of correct translations was higher for sentences with pauses than
for sentences without pauses, thus confirming our hypothesis.
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Cited by (1)
Cited by 1 other publications
Wang, Hongyan & Vincent J. van Heuven
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The Interlanguage Speech Intelligibility Benefit as Bias Toward Native-Language Phonology.
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