Speech technologies have advanced significantly in the last decade, mostly due to rise available computing power combined with novel approaches natural language processing. As a result, speech-enabled systems become popular commercial products, successfully integrated various environments. However, this can be stated for English and few other ?big? languages. From perspective of minority langua...

Spoken language dialogue is a comfortable form of communication between humans and computers, which is present in a growing number of commercial systems. For each task which can be comfortably performed in spoken language dialogue with the computer, there is an equivalence class of tasks which can be performed using similar dialogue management technology. Each such task class has a number of mi...

Performance in speech recognition systems has progressed to the point where it is now realistic to begin integrating speech with natural language systems to produce spoken language systems. Two factors have contributed to the advances in speech: statistical modeling of the input signal and language constraints. To produce spoken language systems, then, the grammar formalisms used in natural lan...

This paper investigates the suitability of state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) tools for parsing the spoken language of second language learners of English. The task of parsing spoken learner-language is important to the domains of automated language assessment (ALA) and computer-assisted language learning (CALL). Due to the non-canonical nature of spoken language (containing fil...

BACKGROUND Most children with hearing loss who receive cochlear implants (CI) learn spoken language, and parents must choose early on whether to use sign language to accompany speech at home. We address whether parents' use of sign language before and after CI positively influences auditory-only speech recognition, speech intelligibility, spoken language, and reading outcomes. METHODS Three g...

When discriminating between spoken samples of unknown foreign languages, infants, young children and adult listeners are able to make same-language/different-language judgments at better than chance levels. Adults can even discriminate between languages when they are produced by the same bilingual talkers. That is, listeners are able to separate talker from language characteristics. One questio...