Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Clear speech is a vocal style used when a speaker wishes to im-prove comprehension, usually due to the presence of externalnoise, less-than-optimal listening conditions, or when they aresimply instructed to speak clearly. Clear speech has many dis-tinguishing features, including increased duration, pitch, andamplitude, as well as the exaggeration of articulatory move-ment. We use game theory to model the phenomenon of clearspeech, and make predictions of how it changes under differ-ent circumstances. We view the behaviours of speakers andhearers when communicating as optimal strategies in commu-nication games. When comprehension becomes more difficult,the optimal strategies of the games shift so that speakers exertmore energy to improve the likelihood of accurate communica-tion. We discuss how our models correspond to experimentalobservations and see what predictions are made for future ex-periments.