Speech Technology and Effective Semiotic Factors on Its Quality: A Listener-Based Analysis

It seems that speech technology is a multidimensional skill which is related to some semiotic verbal and non-verbal issues and is more complicated than the usual and everyday language that native speakers use to communicate. Studies have shown that the power of speech is not any less than magic indeed in many fields.

In this paper, it has been tried to investigate the quality of both speech and speech techniques of 10 Farsi speakers in the viewpoint of 100 Farsi native speakers including 21 verbal, Para-linguistic, non-linguistic, and pro-enunciation factors applying a listener-based method which was done for the first time in Farsi. The Participants have been chosen through stratified sampling to obtain data. The opinion poll has been about the speech quality of the ten Farsi speakers who were speaking spontaneously on TV live programs of Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasts (IRIB). Hence, 20000 data were gathered from the statistical population. Then, descriptive and inferential statistics were calculated to reveal the most effective factors on speech quality.

Selecting the factors were inspired by principles and theories of Grice (1975), Yule and Brown (1989), Edlund and Gustafson (2010) in the framework of Eco Semiotics (1979). Hence, 21000 data were gathered from the statistical population. Then, descriptive and inferential statistics were calculated. At first, in order to find out the questionnaire reliability, some of the respondents (40 people) were asked to complete the questionnaires again after ten days by watching all the ten one-minute recorded films of speeches through the same process. Consequently, after calculating the data and comparing with the previous questionnaires’ results, the reliability of the questionnaire was determined based on intra class coefficient (ICC) procedure. According to the definition of reliability coefficient (Mooner, 2000), the ICC degree for the overall questionnaires was 0.88 that indicates high correlation between both tests with a ten-day time interval. The internal validity of 0.872 was estimated as well.

Subsequently, among all the observed factors, relatively, para-linguistic and non-linguistic factors have been identified as more effective than linguistic and pro-enunciation factors on speech quality of Farsi speaking skills. As a result, by presenting and identifying the degree and the percentage of the related factors, effective improvement and reinforcement strategies on speech techniques quality for Farsi speakers can be specified and clarified.