Logical Reasoning

PT10 · S4 · Q3 People often pronounce a word differently

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People often pronounce a word differently when asked to read written material aloud than when speaking spontaneously.

Facts

contrast

People pronounce words differently depending on whether they're reading written material aloud vs. just speaking spontaneously.

causality (may cause)

Different ways of >> problems for developing pronouncing words speech-recog computers

These computers are trained on samples of people reading written material aloud.

Evaluate

The #1 thing we look for on Most Supported is cause/effect relationships. Here we're learning that the different ways we pronounce words, based on whether we're reading something aloud vs. just speaking might mess up voice recognition computers that are trained on people reading something aloud.

When there's a mix of causality and comparisons, a lot of times they want us to spell out the Implied Differences.

In order for this disparity in pronunciation to be problematic, we'd have to assume a couple things:

- when people use voice-recognition computers, they are often speaking spontaneously (if they were using it while reading written material, there wouldn't be a problem, because the training would match the use case.)

- voice recognition software would recognize the conversational pronunciation of the word as a match for the read-aloud pronunciation of the word (if the program could hear our spontaneous pronunciation of a word and match it with our read-aloud pronunciation, then there wouldn't be a problem).

Goal

Look for the most provable claim.

3.

The observations above provide most evidence for the conclusion that

  1. it will be impossible to

    Too Strong (impossible)

    This is way too strong a takeaway. We heard "these differences may cause problems", not "these differences pose unsurmountable problems!"

    2% picked this

  2. when reading written material, people

    Trap

    Unsupported Comparison (diff accents) Too Strong (the same) We never talked about people with different accents so we have no support for this very implausible idea that a French guy reading written material would pronounce words with an identical accent to a Nigerian guy reading the same written material.

    3% picked this

  3. Correct

    computers may be less reliable

    Why this is right

    The lovably weak "may be less reliable" draws us in. This is spelling out an Implied Difference. Since pronunciation is different for read-aloud vs. spontaneous, and since computers are trained on read-aloud, computers will be better at recognizing read-aloud pronunciations than spontaneous pronunciations.

    Skill tested: Most Supported · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.

    91% picked this

  4. a “trained” computer never correctly

    Too Strong (never)

    This is way too strong, when all we heard is that the pronunciation difference may cause problems. This is making it sound like the computer program would never once interpret the words of someone speaking spontaneously. If this answer were true, then (C) would also be true. We can never pick an answer that would imply the truth of another answer.

    4% picked this

  5. computers are now able to

    Trap

    Too Strong (without error) Opposite (if anything) The passage was explaining how computers could potentially struggle to interpret oral speech (since they're trained on read-aloud samples but people pronounce words differently when they speak spontaneously). This meanwhile is saying that speech recognition is perfect.

    1% picked this

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