Evaluating Synthetic Speech Workload with Oculo-motor Indices: Preliminary Observations for Japanese Speech

Mateusz Dubiel, Minoru Nakayama, Xin Wang

2021

Abstract

Pupillometry has recently been introduced as a method to evaluate cognitive workload of synthetic speech. Prior research conducted on English speech indicates that in noisy listening conditions, pupil dilation is significantly higher for synthetic speech as compared to natural speech. In a lab-based listening experiment, we evaluated participants’ (n=16) pupil responses to Japanese speech (natural vs. synthetic) at three different signal-to-noise levels (-1dB, -3dB and -5dB). Our research expands on previous work by evaluating pupillary responses both in terms of temporal changes in pupil size and degree of pupil oscillations. We observe statistically significant differences in pupil sizes at the recall stage between each type of speech. For pupil oscillations, we register statistically significant differences in frequency power spectrum densities (PSDs). Our investigation proposes an expansion of the current synthetic speech evaluation methods that are based on pupillary responses and outlines possible avenues for future research that arise from the findings of this work.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Dubiel M., Nakayama M. and Wang X. (2021). Evaluating Synthetic Speech Workload with Oculo-motor Indices: Preliminary Observations for Japanese Speech. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2021) - Volume 4: BIOSIGNALS; ISBN 978-989-758-490-9, SciTePress, pages 335-342. DOI: 10.5220/0010341300002865

in Bibtex Style

@conference{biosignals21,
author={Mateusz Dubiel and Minoru Nakayama and Xin Wang},
title={Evaluating Synthetic Speech Workload with Oculo-motor Indices: Preliminary Observations for Japanese Speech},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2021) - Volume 4: BIOSIGNALS},
year={2021},
pages={335-342},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010341300002865},
isbn={978-989-758-490-9},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2021) - Volume 4: BIOSIGNALS
TI - Evaluating Synthetic Speech Workload with Oculo-motor Indices: Preliminary Observations for Japanese Speech
SN - 978-989-758-490-9
AU - Dubiel M.
AU - Nakayama M.
AU - Wang X.
PY - 2021
SP - 335
EP - 342
DO - 10.5220/0010341300002865
PB - SciTePress