EYE-FIXATION AS A MEASURE OF REAL-TIME PROCESSING OF SYNTHESIZED WORDS

We present experimental evidence from a study in which we monitor eye movements as people respond to pre-recorded instructions generated by a human speaker and by two text-tospeech synthesizers. We replicate findings demonstrating that people process human speech incrementally, making partial commitments as a word unfolds. Specifically, they entertain multiple lexical candidates on the fly depending on segmental overlap in the candidate set. Importantly, incremental understanding is also observed for synthesized text-to-speech instructions. These results, including some suggestive differences in responses with the two text-to-speech systems, establish the potential for using eye-tracking methodology together with synthesized speech stimuli as a powerful theoretical and experimental tool for spoken language processing research. 1. BACKGROUND Spoken utterances unfold over time, and psycholinguistic studies of natural speech have shown that the time course of spoken language results in a stream of temporary ambiguities a