We tested the various pause and speed-up conditions, which were based on the pauses and speedups typically used by teachers and other live readers for similar expressions, without informing the students of the nature and purpose of the pauses and speedups. We did so in order to see how students would naturally respond to the pauses in the speech, as opposed to creating expectations about them. The drawback, however, of not providing such information is that some of those students who mentioned noticing pauses and changes to the speech rate thought the prosodic elements might be inadvertent, a computer or otherwise not intended to “stumble,” convey meaning—even though teachers and other live readers tend to employ similar pauses or speedups when they speak math in the classroom. Students may not have expected such purposeful behavior from a computerized voice. It is possible that providing some explanation of how pauses and other prosodic elements are used, or even the natural process of getting used to computerized math speech (as students may already be used to computerized speech of nonmath material), might improve students’ likelihood of benefitting from enhanced prosody. As can be seen in the section, some students did catch on to the intention behind the pauses, supporting the possibility that further instruction and familiarization would make the prosody more helpful. Our primary goal at this point in the project was to provide speech that students would find understandable with little or no prior instruction, and so it is not surprising that what students most expected (end language) was more understandable to most (but not all) of them. A further inquiry could be conducted as to whether, if students were given opportunities to expect and become familiar with potentially helpful prosodic elements, such as strategic pauses and speedups, they would have different impressions of the elements’ usefulness or different relative success in identifying expressions. The results of such an inquiry could provide suggestions for further adjustments to the synthetic speech rules, recommendations for adjustments to human speech guidelines, and additional insights into cognitive processing. Research Question 2 (Nested Parentheses) Section 2 focused on the handling of nested parentheses and how different prosodic or lexical treatments might help listeners keep track of the various open/close parentheses pairs in the expression and their relationship to each other (i.e., how they nest). Consider an expression with multiple sets of nested parentheses, such as .
We tested the various pause and speed-up conditions, which were based on the pauses and speedups typically used by teachers and other live readers for similar expressions, without informing the students of the nature and purpose of the pauses and speedups. We did so in order to see how students would naturally respond to the pauses in the speech, as opposed to creating expectations about them. The drawback, however, of not providing such information is that some of those students who mentioned noticing pauses and changes to the speech rate thought the prosodic elements might be inadvertent, a computer “stumble,” or otherwise not intended to convey meaning—even though teachers and other live readers tend to employ similar pauses or speedups when they speak math in the classroom. Students may not have expected such purposeful behavior from a computerized voice. It is possible that providing some explanation of how pauses and other prosodic elements are used, or even the natural process of getting used to computerized math speech (as students may already be used to computerized speech of nonmath material), might improve students’ likelihood of benefitting from enhanced prosody. As can be seen in the section, some students did catch on to the intention behind the pauses, supporting the possibility that further instruction and familiarization would make the prosody more helpful. Our primary goal at this point in the project was to provide speech that students would find understandable with little or no prior instruction, and so it is not surprising that what students most expected (end language) was more understandable to most (but not all) of them. A further inquiry could be conducted as to whether, if students were given opportunities to expect and become familiar with potentially helpful prosodic elements, such as strategic pauses and speedups, they would have different impressions of the elements’ usefulness or different relative success in identifying expressions. The results of such an inquiry could provide suggestions for further adjustments to the synthetic speech rules, recommendations for adjustments to human speech guidelines, and additional insights into cognitive processing. Research Question 2 (Nested Parentheses) Section 2 focused on the handling of nested parentheses and how different prosodic or lexical treatments might help listeners keep track of the various open/close parentheses pairs in the expression and their relationship to each other (i.e., how they nest). Consider an expression with multiple sets of nested parentheses, such as .
RR-16-33.docx