The Intelligibility of Excerpts from Conversation

Abstract

Excised speech samples, excerpted from the conversational speech of college female speakers, were presented to listeners for identification. The average intelligibility of such samples increases with the duration of the excised utterance, and is relatively independent of the average rate of speaking. The results are interpreted such that talkers aim for a constant precision of communication, trading off the precision of enunciation associated with the rate of speaking against the additional context associated with the number of words.