Reverberation causes degradation in speech comprehension, especially for elderly people, the hearing-impaired and non-native listeners. In order to prevent intelligibility degradation, we developed several pre-processing techniques, where signals are processed before being radiated through the loudspeakers of a public address system. The two main techniques are modulation filtering and steady-s...

1 Section of Environmental Health, Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark 2 Department of Biosciences and Nutrition, Karolinska Institutet, Huddinge, Sweden 3 Environmental Risk and Health Unit, Flemish Institute for Technological Research (VITO), Mol, Belgium 4 Environmental Chemistry (MILK), Health Effects Laboratory, Norwegian Institute for Air Research (N...

For speech synthesis systems that transform text materials into voice data, correctness and naturalness are the crucial measures of performance, the latter gaining more emphasis recently. In order to make synthesized voices natural, we must take into account pronunciation-related linguistic phenomena such as homograph, among others. The syntax certainly provides an important clue to disambiguat...

In the first part of the paper, I’ll rehearse an argument that perceiving that we see and hear isn’t a special case of perception in Aristotle but is rather a necessary condition for any perception whatsoever: the turning of one’s attention to the affection of the sense organs. In the second part of the paper, I’ll consider the thesis that the activity of the active intellect is analogous to pe...

This study explored which segmental sounds of English spoken by Japanese L1 speakers were intelligible to non-native speakers of English. It also investigated the reasons for the reduced intelligibility of some of the sounds. Thus, this study addressed two research questions: RQ1 “What English phonemes spoken with a Japanese accent are intelligible enough in international settings?”, and RQ2, “...

Context-aware applications can facilitate people as they carry out their daily tasks. These applications can use a suite of sensors to detect what is happening in the environment and with the user. They can then infer the user intention. This way, they try to understand the contexts of the situation, and consequently act to provide services. For example, a smart phone can recognize that you are...

Quine’s thesis of underdetermination is significantly weaker than it has been taken to be in the recent literature, for the following reasons: (i) it does not hold for all theories, but only for some global theories, (ii) it does not require the existence of empirically equivalent yet logically incompatible theories, (iii) it does not rule out the possibility that all perceived rivalry between ...