Laboratory speech is often implicitly assumed to be a stable and reliable source of data for phonetic studies and perception tests. At the same time, researchers are conscious that some of its parameters may significantly change due to... more
Laboratory speech is often implicitly assumed to be a stable and reliable source of data for phonetic studies and perception tests. At the same time, researchers are conscious that some of its parameters may significantly change due to minute changes in the internal states of the speaker or in recording conditions, including the environment and its acoustic properties. While we are able to detect tiny changes in the spectral and prosodic parameters of speech, it is usually more difficult to decide on their perception and communicative relevance. In the present study an attempt is made to find out whether speaking style changes occurring due to the change of experimental setting (type of microphone), related to the dialogue task stage (e.g. initial vs. final) as well as those resulting from explicit evaluation of the behavior of the participants, can be perceived in short samples of speech. Experimental stimuli are extracted from task-oriented dialogues and used in a perception test involving same-different and two-dimensional evaluation paradigms. The results show that the influence of the experimental setting factor can be detected, especially when combined with speaker factor, i.e. the specific realization of the differences does appear to be setting-dependent but also highly individual.
