Speakers may adapt the phonetic details of their productions when they anticipate perceptual difficulty or comprehension failure on the part of a listener. Previous research suggests that a speaking style known as clear speech is more intelligible overall than casual, conversational speech for a variety of listener populations. However, it is unknown whether clear speech improves the intelligib...

The Somatic Signal Detection Task (SSDT) is a recent paradigm serving to examine perceptual processes likely relevant for somatoform disorders. We tested whether touch illusions are more easily induced in individuals suffering from somatoform disorders (SFD) and whether their perceptual threshold for tactile stimuli is lower compared to healthy controls. Thirty-three participants with SFD and 3...

Orienting visual attention is closely linked to the oculomotor system. For example, a shift of attention is usually followed by a saccadic eye movement and can be revealed by micro saccades. Recently we reported a novel role of another type of eye movement, namely eye vergence, in orienting visual attention. Shifts in visuospatial attention are characterized by the response modulation to a sele...

For the purpose of understanding how head motions contribute to the perception of emotion in an utterance, we aim to examine the perception of emotion based on Fourier transform-based static and dynamic features of head motion. Our work is to conduct intra-related objective analysis and perceptual experiments on the link between the perception of emotion and the static/dynamic features. The obj...

BACKGROUND In the brain, processing of fearful stimuli engages the amygdala, and the variability of its activity is associated with genetic factors as well as with emotional salience. The objective of this study was to explore the relevance of personality style for variability of amygdala response. METHODS We studied two groups (n=14 in each group) of healthy subjects categorized by contrasti...

Human speech communication can be thought of as comprising two channels – the words themselves, and the style in which they are spoken. Each of these channels carries information. Today's most-advanced text-to-speech (TTS) systems such as [1],[2],[3],[4] fall far short of human speech because they offer only a single, fixed style of delivery, independent of the message. In this paper, we descri...

The perceptual error of the investors is one of the issues discussed in behavioral finance. The perceptual error is a wrong sensual or perceptual error.  That is, what we see or hear does not match with the reality. Regarding the fact that the perception of individuals is affected by their worldview and beliefs and religious attitudes can also affect their viewpoint, in this study, the relation...

This work investigates acoustic and perceptual differences in four language varieties by using a corpus of professional and non-professional speaking styles. The professional stimuli are composed of excerpts of broadcast news and political discourses from six subjects in each case. The non-professional stimuli are made up of recordings of 10 subjects who read a long story and narrated it subseq...

One of the biggest challenges in speech synthesis is the production of naturally sounding synthetic voices. This means that the resulting voice must be not only of high enough quality but also that it must be able to capture the natural expressiveness imbued in human speech. This paper focus on solving the expressiveness problem by proposing a set of different techniques that could be used for ...

Working memory and attentional inhibition processes (jointly symbolized here as WM/I) have been proposed to explain cognitive style differences in Field Dependence-Independence (FDI). FI relative to FD subjects have been found to use more effectively WM/I to operate on task-relevant information. The purpose of this study was to determine whether cognitive style differences are revealed as diffe...