PSYCHOLOGY MASTER'S THESIS ABSTRACT

Ralph Pennella, III

Industrial/Organizational
May 1992
 

The Effects of Speech Rate and Sentence Length on the Recall of Synthetic Speech
for Meaningful and Anomalous Sentences

    Recall of synthetic speech was evaluated for reduced speech rate, increased sentence length, and sentence context.  Sixteen subjects were presented two types of synthetically produced sentences—semantically meaningful and semantically anomalous—at pause duration levels of 0 and 595 msec and at three sentence lengths (5, 7 and 9 key words), and were asked to recall the key words of the sentences.

    Recall increased for meaningful and anomalous sentences as pause duration increased.  There was a significant interaction between sentence length and sentence type: as sentence length increased, recall of meaningful sentences decreased at a faster rate than anomalous sentences.  Contrary to prediction, there was no interaction between sentence length and pause duration.  A greater percentage of words was recalled for meaningful sentences than for anomalous sentences.
    Increases in pause duration may provide additional processing time to aid in the encoding of works in short-term memory.  Also, longer sentences place more demands on short-term memory.

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