Recent work has implicated low-frequency (<20 Hz) neuronal phase information as important for both auditory (<10 Hz) and speech [theta (∼4-8 Hz)] perception. Activity on the timescale of theta corresponds linguistically to the average length of a syllable, suggesting that information within this range has consequences for segmentation of meaningful units of speech. Longer timescales that corres...

We present a project aimed at understanding the acoustic and prosodic correlates of confidence and uncertainty in spoken language. We elicited speech produced under varying levels of certainty and performed perceptual and statistical analyses on the speech data to determine which prosodic features (e.g., pitch, energy, timing) are associated with a speaker’s level of certainty and where these p...

This paper proposes a two-layer model of the information carried in the speech signal. It attempts to define the role of prosody with a wider scope than has previously been considered in speech synthesis or linguistic research, by taking into account affective information in addition to that of linguistic content. The work is based on analysis of a large corpus of spontaneous conversational spe...

This article presents a thorough experimental comparison of several acoustic modeling techniques by their ability to capture information related to orofacial motion. These models include (1) Linear Predictive Coding and Linear Spectral Frequencies, which model the dynamics of the speech production system, (2) Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients and Perceptual Critical Feature Bands, which encod...

This paper analyzes the human performance of recognizing drunk speakers merely by voice and compares the results with the performance of an automatic statistical classifier. The study is carried out within the Interspeech 2011 Speaker State Challenge [1] employing the Alcohol Language Corpus (ALC) [2]. The 79 subjects yielded an average performance of 55.8% unweighted accuracy on a balanced int...

Inferior frontal regions in the left and right hemisphere support different aspects of language processing. In the classic model, left inferior frontal regions are mostly involved in processing based on phonological, syntactic and semantic features of language, whereas the right inferior frontal regions process paralinguistic aspects like affective prosody. Using DTI-based probabilistic fiber t...

Prosody has long been studied as a knowledge source in speech processing. We attempt to directly exploit prosodic correlates in acoustic modeling of speech for large vocabulary recognition. We compare two methods for using the fundamental frequency and voicing parameters. The more complex approach starts by modeling prosodic classes and using a representation of their recognized sequences as ac...

This paper models speech recognition as the estimation of distinctive feature values at articulatory landmarks 8]. Toward this end, we propose modeling each distinctive feature as a table containing phonetic contexts, a list of signal measurements (acoustic correlates) which provide information about the feature in each context, and, for each context, a statistical model for evaluating the feat...

PURPOSE Acquisition of prosodic control appears to evolve across development with younger children relying on durational cues and older children utilizing a broader spectrum of cues including fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration. This study aimed to determine whether unfamiliar listeners could identify prosodic contrasts produced by 4-, 7-, and 11-year-olds despite differences in acou...

The point of interest in the present investigation is to find out and to make a pilot statistical presentation of the prominence distinguished by native speakers in read aloud texts taken from the Russian corpus for text-to-speech unit-selection synthesis. The TTS system uses the linguistic information encoded in the input text. Therefore the parameters which are easily extracted from the text ...