Parameters of Information-Rich Auditory Announcements

Abstract

An investigation of factors influencing the effectiveness of brief (< 5 minutes), information-rich auditory-announcements began with a literature review that identified several potentially important variables. Next, an initial experiment examined the relative importance of some of these variables in the context of a prototype audiotex application. The results of this study allowed tentative conclusions to be made about the influence of several announcement parameters including duration, speech rate, amount of information, and linguistic complexity, on memory and preference for announcements. Finally, a follow-up experiment focused on the speech rate variable and on the use of time-compressed speech to increase the efficiency of information acquisition. Results of this study indicated that although learning efficiency can be significantly increased by accelerating speech to 1.5x normal rate, listeners prefer a speech rate closer to normal.