A sentence comprehension test with whistled Spanish experts
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2023/14/0017/000611Keywords:
Whistled language, Speech, Intelligibility, Sentence comprehension, Silbo GomeroAbstract
Whistled speech remains intelligible to trained listeners, despite a phonetic transformation of spoken utterances into whistled melodies. So far, very few studies have systematically tested the intelligibility of whistled sentences by expert whistlers, and the question remains as to how long meaningful sentences with little context would be recognized. In the present study, we built an original experimental setting to test 22 highly trained whistlers on such long and unexpected sentences. We measured recognition rates at different levels of these sentences (words, syllables, vowels) and explored confusion patterns in relation to acoustic measures. Results show high recognition rates considering the difficulty of the task and corroborate whistlers’ observations.
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Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
