This work was aimed at investigating individual variability in the perception of synthetic speech. A homogeneous group of 50 listeners was tested on a wide range of synthetic speech material of increasing complexity. This included intelligibility tests for nonsense VCV utterances, semantically-anomalous and meaningful sentences and speech pattern identification tests for plosive place and voicing contrasts in three vocalic contexts. Data was examined for evidence of different listener strategies. The implications of these results for synthetic speech intelligibility and enhancement are examined.

Keywords: Synthetic speech, speech perception, individual differences.