An Analysis of Learners’ Perception to Synthetic Voices in Russian Language Learning

In this work-in-progress paper, we investigated differences in learners’ perception to synthetic and human voices speaking Russian to evaluate the possibility to utilize synthetic voice for learning and teaching Russian language as a foreign language (RFL). In the investigation, we conducted a word listening test. The results reveal that there is no difference between synthetic and human voices in terms of percentage of correct answers. However, there is a tendency that synthetic voice is easier for learners to recognize correctly, when specific consonants are sounded, or learners have a lower listening ability.