Intelligibility of locally time-reversed speech: A multilingual comparison.

ABSTRACT: A set of experiments was performed to make a cross-language comparison of intelligibility of locally time-reversed speech, employing a total of 117 native listeners of English, German, Japanese, and Mandarin Chinese. The experiments enabled to examine whether the languages of three types of timing-stress-, syllable-, and mora-timed languages-exhibit different trends in intelligibility, depending on the duration of the segments that were temporally reversed. The results showed a strikingly similar trend across languages, especially when the time axis of segment duration was normalised with respect to the deviation of a talker's speech rate from the average in each language. This similarity is somewhat surprising given the systematic differences in vocalic proportions characterising the lang

SUBMITTER: Ueda K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5431844 | biostudies-literature | 2017 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature