Mixed-Cultural Speech for Mixed-Cultural Users - Natural vs. Synthetic Speech for Virtual Agents

This study investigates how different levels of a non-native Turkish accent in German speech are perceived by Turkish-German listeners, using either natural or synthetic speech. The participants listened to six audio recordings and rated the respective speaker regarding her mother tongue, warmth, competence, and intelligibility. The results show that the naturalness of speech had no impact on the non-native speakers’ ability to assign the correct mother tongue to the respective speaker. It did, however have an impact on the speakers’ perceived warmth, competence and intelligibility.