(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2017-06)
Gable, Thomas M.; Tomlinson, Brianna; Cantrell, Stanley; Walker, Bruce N.
Auditory displays have been used extensively to enhance
visual menus across diverse settings for various reasons.
While standard auditory displays can be effective and help
users across these settings, standard auditory displays often
consist of text to speech cues, which can be time intensive to
use. Advanced auditory cues including spindex and spearcon
cues have been developed to help address this slow feedback
issue. While these cues are most often used in English, they
have also been applied to other languages, but research on
using them in tonal languages, which may affect the ability to
use them, is lacking. The current research investigated the
use of spindex and spearcon cues in Mandarin, to determine
their effectiveness in a tonal language. The results suggest
that the cues can be effectively applied and used in a tonal
language by untrained novices. This opens the door to future
use of the cues in languages that reach a large portion of the
world’s population.