Hyperarticulation

A speaking style in which a person exaggerates the clarity of their pronunciation by moving their tongue and mouth to more extreme positions, producing more distinct vowel and consonant sounds. Hyperarticulation occurs naturally when speakers perceive that their listener is having difficulty understanding them — for example, when speaking to someone who is deaf or hard of hearing, a non-native speaker, or an automatic speech recognition system showing errors. Research shows that speakers hyperarticulate by increasing voice intensity, shifting formant frequencies (F1 and F2), and sometimes slowing their speech rate. Understanding hyperarticulation is important for ASR system design because speech produced in accessibility contexts (such as captioning for DHH users) may differ acoustically from the training data most ASR systems are built on.