Influence of TTS systems performance on reaction times in people with aphasia

Text-to-speech (TTS) systems provide fundamental reading support for people with aphasia and reading difficulties. However, artificial voices are more difficult to process than natural voices. The current study is an extended analysis of the results of a clinical experiment investigating which, amon...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Cistola, Giorgia, Peiró-Lilja, Alex, Cámbara, Guillermo, Meulen, Ineke van der, Farrús, Mireia
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2021
País:España
Institución:Varias* (Consorci de Biblioteques Universitáries de Catalunya, Centre de Serveis Científics i Acadèmics de Catalunya)
Repositorio:Recercat. Dipósit de la Recerca de Catalunya
OAI Identifier:oai:recercat.cat:2445/183000
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2445/183000
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Afàsia
Processament de la parla
Comprensió
Aphasia
Speech processing systems
Comprehension
Descripción
Sumario:Text-to-speech (TTS) systems provide fundamental reading support for people with aphasia and reading difficulties. However, artificial voices are more difficult to process than natural voices. The current study is an extended analysis of the results of a clinical experiment investigating which, among three artificial voices and a digitised human voice, is more suitable for people with aphasia and reading impairments. Such results show that the voice synthesised with Ogmios TTS, a concatenative speech synthesis system, caused significantly slower reaction times than the other three voices used in the experiment. The present study explores whether and what voice quality metrics are linked to delayed reaction times. For this purpose, the voices were analysed using an automatic assessment of intelligibility, naturalness, and jitter and shimmer voice quality parameters. This analysis revealed that Ogmios TTS, in general, performed worse than the other voices in all parameters. These observations could explain the significantly delayed reaction times in people with aphasia and reading impairments when listening to Ogmios TTS and could open up consideration about which TTS to choose for compensative devices for these patients based on the voice analysis of these parameters.