The present study was conducted to determine the effects of training on the perception of synthetic speech. Three groups of subjects were tested with synthetic speech using the same tasks before and after training. One group was trained with synthetic speech. A second group went through the identical training procedures using natural speech. The third group received no training. Although performance of the three groups was the same prior to training, significant differences on the post-test measures of word recognition were observed: the group trained with synthetic speech performed much better than the other two groups. A six-month follow-up indicated that the group trained with synthetic speech displayed long-term retention of the knowledge and experience gained with prior exposure to synthetic speech generated by a text-to-speech system.
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