Effects of repeated listening experiences on the perception of synthetic speech by individuals with mild-to-moderate intellectual disabilities

The purpose of this study was to examine whether individuals with intellectual disabilities (n = 18) demonstrate improvement in the perception of synthetic speech as a result of repeated exposure to it. Specifically, effects of training on novel versus repeated stimuli produced by the ETI Eloquence (TM) speech synthesizer were analyzed. Results revealed that training and experimental task each played a significant (p values < 0.01) role in the perception of synthetic words and sentences. Further, there was an absence of significant effect (p > 0.01) for stimulus type (i.e., repeated versus novel) suggesting that individuals with intellectual disabilities are able to generalize their knowledge of the acoustic-phonetic properties of synthetic speech to novel stimuli. Data are also presented for typical participants to establish a benchmark condition for the newly developed Eloquence synthesizer.