INFLUENCES ON VIRTUAL CAR DRIVING WHILE PAYING ATTENTION TO LISTENING TO SPEECH

In order to make it clear whether a driver is able to drive an automobile safely while paying attention to listening to incoherent speech, authors made experiments to measure changes of running speed (lap time), sentence intelligibility, mental workload and occurrences of accidents, using a car-racing simulator. These changes were measured as a mathematical function of speech rate (tempo) ranging from 4.5 to 13 morae/s. Three voice types; natural speech, fine synthesized speech, and standard synthesized speech were used. Results suggested that expert drivers could drive the automobile with composure safely while paying attention to the speech. For the covering abstract see ITRD E134653.