Intonation Perception in Real and Synthetic Speech across Varying Familiarity Levels: A Pilot Study of Equivalence Assessment

Language training relies on a corpus constructed by a large number linguistic materials. AI-powered voice clones provide a way to construct the corpus with relatively low cost. Singing voice conversion (SVC) model is used to generate synthetic voices. This study compares participants' performances on natural and synthetic speech in two experiments, similarity perception and intonation recognition. In the accuracy of similarity perception task, a significant interaction between speech type and intonation is found, suggesting that question may serve as a cue for speaker identification but may be influenced by synthetic features. In the accuracy of intonation recognition task, a significant interaction between speech type and familiarity is observed, indicating that speech type affects how much familiarity contributes to voice processing.