Intelligibility of time-compressed synthetic speech: Compression method and speaking style

•Analysis of listeners’ intelligibility of natural and synthetic time-compressed speech.•Different compression methods are applied to normal and fast speech.•We evaluated a linear method and two non linear methods that act on the duration model.•The linear method outperforms the others, particularly for ultra-fast (3xs) rates.•The gain from using fast data is dependent on how intelligible it is.