The paper reports on experiments with acoustic recordings of a self-built replica of the historic speaking machine of Wolfgang von Kempelen. Several possibilities of the reed as the glottal excitation mechanism were tested. Perception tests with naïve listeners revealed that the machinegenerated words 'mama' and 'papa' were partially recognised as an authentic child voice – as it was also the c...

We have tackled the problem of predicting when a user is likely to begin speaking to a humanoid robot. The generality of the prediction model should be examined so that it can be applied to various users. We present two empirical evaluations demonstrating that 1) our proposed model does not depend on the specific participants whose data were used in our previous data collection, and 2) the mode...

in the healthcare context, whistleblowing has come to the fore of political, professional and public attention in the wake of major service scandals and mounting evidence of the routine threats to safety that patients face in their care. this paper offers a commentary and wider contextualisation of mannion and davies, ‘cultures of silence and cultures of voice: the role of whistleblowing in hea...

conclusions the findings of this study indicate that older children are more proficient in comprehension of color words compared to younger children, and girls are more proficient than boys. the two easiest and two most difficult color words for children to comprehend within the 3 age groups were “black” and “red” and “phosphoric-green” and “turquoise-blue,” respectively. there was a positive r...

Speaking is one important skill in language learning. EFL students are sometimes faced with problems, while speaking to their interlocutors due to the lack of sufficient linguistic knowledge, and they have to quit the conversation. This study examines the use of speaking strategies by some Iranian male and female EFL university students .The use of these strategies was examined in relation to t...

Speaking is one important skill in language learning. EFL students are sometimes faced with problems, while speaking to their interlocutors due to the lack of sufficient linguistic knowledge, and they have to quit the conversation. This study examines the use of speaking strategies by some Iranian male and female EFL university students .The use of these strategies was examined in relation to t...

the aim of the current study was to examine the effect of metacognitive instruction on efl learners’ metacognitive awareness of listening strategies, listening comprehension, and oral language proficiency. fifty students of two upper-intermediate english courses participated in the study and were sampled as the experimental and control groups. for sixteen weeks the experimental group participat...

Results: The results showed significant differnces between working memory capacity in the intellectually disabled children and normal ones (p-value <0.00001). After using the computerized working memory training, Visual-spatial WM, auditory WM, and speaking were improved in the trained group. The mentioned four tests showed significant differences between pre-test and post-test. The trained gro...

We report on an English-speaking, aphasic individual (TB) who showed a striking dissociation in speaking with the different forms (allomorphs) that an inflection can take. Although very accurate in producing the consonantal inflections (-/s/, -/z/, -/d/, -/t/), TB consistently omitted syllabic inflections (-/əz/, -/əd/), therefore correctly saying "dogs" or "walked," but "bench" for benches or ...

The purpose of this study is to search for any difference in self-expression of Second Life residents with different levels of shyness. For this purpose, we used sixty students from two fifth-grade elementary school classes. Thirty students were assigned to the high shyness group and the rest to the low shyness group. Each group completed preand postself-expression tests. After six weeks of spe...