Designing Effective Speech Interfaces

Appendix B

Glossary

acoustic cues. Sounds that help a listener filter invariants (noise) in coordination with lexical information. For example, the suprasegmental phonemes.

affixes. Bound morphemes that modify meaning, such as by changing person, gender, tense, or number. For example, prefixes and suffixes are affixes.

affricatives. Complex sounds that are initially a stop but become a fricative, such as ch in chill.

agglutination. Concatenating morphemes to create a new word.

allophones. A subclass of phonemes that have a variation based on the sound resulting from a puff of air being released when the sound is made.

amplitude. The loudness of a sound, determined by the size of its wavelength.

articulation. The expulsion of air from the oral cavity.

assertion. Information that the speaker assumes is new to the listener or justifies emphasis.

assistive technology. Specialized technology that accommodates users with disabilities.

asynchronous communication. Communication where the receiver actually receives the message at a time different from its transmission time. For example, e-mail and voice mail.

attack. The point in time when a sound begins.

auditory icon. A non-speech audio signal that is based on a real world sound. For example, the sound of a police siren that conveys an emergency.

auditory user interface (AUI). An interface that relies primarily or exclusively on audio, including speech and sounds, for interaction.

barge-in. A technique that allows users to interrupt the ...