The Impact of Pause-Internal Phonetic Particles on Recall in Synthesized Lectures

Mikey Elmers, Eva Szekely

Keywords: speech synthesis, pause particles, recall

Abstract: We studied the effect of pause-internal phonetic particles (PINTs) on recall for native and non-native listeners of English in a listening experiment with synthesized material that simulated a university lecture. Using a neural speech synthesizer trained on recorded lectures with PINTs annotations, we generated three distinct conditions: a base version, a "silence" version where non-silence PINTs were replaced with silence, and a "nopints" version where all PINTs, including silences, were removed. Half of the participants were informed they were listening to computer-generated audio, while the other half were told the audio was recorded with a poor-quality microphone. We found that neither the condition nor the participants' native language significantly affected their overall score, and the presence of PINTs before critical information had a negative effect on recall. This study highlights the importance of considering PINTs for educational purposes in speech synthesis systems.