Even though auditory training exercises for humans have been shown to improve certain perceptual skills of individuals with and without hearing loss, there is a lack of knowledge pertaining to which aspects of training are responsible for the perceptual gains, and which aspects of perception are changed. To better define how auditory training impacts brain and behavior, electroencephalography (...

OBJECTIVES Lung cancer surgery leads to long term survival for some patients but little is known about how patients decide whether to accept the associated surgical risks. The objective of this qualitative study was to explore patients' attitudes to the risks associated with lung cancer surgery. METHODS Fifteen patients with resectable lung cancer, recruited via multi-disciplinary team meetin...

This paper presents an automatic speech recognition system using acoustic models based on both sub-phonetic units and broad, phonological features such as Voiced and Round as output densities in a hidden Markov model framework. The aim of this work is to improve speech recognition performance particularly on conversational speech by using units other than phones as a basis for discrimination be...

This study examined production of word-final English /p/ and /b/ by subjects whose native language does not possess voiced stops in word-final position. Native Chinese adults resembled native English adults, native English children, and native Chinese children in producing /p/ with greater peak oral air pressure than /b/. However, unlike subjects in the other groups, the Chinese adults' /b/ was...

Abstract This multi-voiced and polyphonic chapter discusses the usefulness of discomfort in contestation digital pedagogies when working for reconciliation colonised geographies. To do so, we outline complexities teaching spaces during pandemic, imperative to honour first peoples custodians country from which are teaching. We consider global local considerations movements like #blacklivesmatter...

Previous research has shown that speakers do not produce all non-native phonotactic sequences with equal accuracy. Several reasons for these accuracy differences have been proposed, including markedness, analogical extension from permitted sequences, and language-independent phonetic factors. In this study, evidence from the production of unattested obstruent-initial onset clusters by English a...

Thispaper proposes an MP-CELP (Multi-Pulse-based CELP) speech coding at 4 kb/s. In MP-CELP, amplitudes or signs of multi-pulse excitation are simultaneously vector quantized (VQ). In order to improve speech quality for background noise conditions, excitation signal is switched between voiced and unvoiced speech, and the number of pulse is greatly increased for unvoiced speech by restricting pul...

The HMM-based speech synthesis system can produce high quality synthetic speech with flexible modeling of spectral and prosodic parameters. In this approach, short term spectra, fundamental frequency (F0) and duration are generated by multi-stream HMMs separately. However the quality of synthetic speech degrades when feature vectors used in training are noisy. Among all noisy features, pitch tr...

The revised version of the Speech Learning Model (SLM-r) regards full-time equivalent (FTE), which involves amount L2 use during length residence (LOR) in an setting, as main factor speech acquisition. Previous studiesshowed that LOR has a significant effect on and L1 production perception but does not explain differences between populations (i.e., L1-Spanish L2-English vs. L1-English L2-Spanis...

This study examined how duration of an unstressed final syllable in English is affected by conditions in the following word: stress (trochaic/iambic), accent (accented/unaccented), and initial stop voicing (voiced/voiceless). Results showed that the unstressed final syllable was shorter before an unstressed syllable, presumably due to polysyllabic shortening—i.e., the following unstressed sylla...