Talking to a system and oneself: A study from a Speech-to-Speech, Machine Translation mediated Map Task

The results of a comparison between three different speech types — On-Talk, speaking to a computer, Off-Talk Self , speaking to oneself and Off-Talk Other, speaking to another person — uttered by subjects in a collaborative interlingual task mediated by an automatic speech-to-speech translation system, are reported here. The characteristics of the three speech types show significant differences in terms of speech rate (F2,2719 = 101.7; p < 2e − 16), and for this reason a detection method was implemented to see if they could also be detected with good accuracy based on their acoustic and biological characteristics. Acoustic and biological measures provide good results in distinguish between On-Talk and Off-Talk, but have difficulty distinguishing the sub-criteria of Off-Talk: Self and Other.