Discrimination and perception of the acoustic rendition of texts by blind people

Abstract

This paper reports on the results from a series of psychoacoustic experiments in the field of the auditory representation of texts via synthetic speech which comprise similar acoustic patterns so called "paronyms". The errors which occur when listening to paronyms are classified as errors of phonological type. Thirty blind and thirty sighted students participated in psychoacoustic experiments. The results from the experiments depicted the types of the subjects' errors and addressed comparisons between the performances of blind and sighted students on their auditory distinctions towards the chosen scripts (paronym words and sentences with paronyms). The discussion considered the practical implications of the findings such as issues regarding education as well as the development of suitable design of acoustic rendition of texts in favor of better perception and comprehension. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.