The effect of pause insertion on the intelligibility of Danish among Swedes

Abstract

Scharpff & Van Heuven (1988) have shown that low-quality, synthetic speech is better understood when pauses are inserted at prosodic boundaries. Their study pertains to an L1 situation. In the present paper we test the hypothesis that the positive effect of particular pauses on intelligibility within the same language can be generalized to speech of an unknown but closely related language. We presented long Danish sentences to Swedish listeners in two versions, one without pauses and one with pauses at prosodic boundaries. The results showed that the percentage of correct translations was higher for sentences with pauses than for sentences without pauses, thus confirming our hypothesis.