The purpose of this paper is to examine the viability of simulating one dialect with the speech segments of another dialect through prosody cloning. The hypothesis is that, among Korean regional dialects, it is not the segmental differences but the prosodic differences that play a major role in authentic dialect perception. This work intends to support the hypothesis by simulating Masan dialect...

Mundane discourse abounds with utterances referring to other utterances. These meta-language utterances appear with surprising frequency in task-oriented dialogues, such as those arising in the context of a natural language interface to an operating system. This paper identifies some simpler types of dialogue-level meta language utterance and provides a computational framework to process such p...

We frequently experience and successfully process anomalous utterances. Here we examine whether people do this by 'correcting' syntactic anomalies to yield well-formed representations. In two structural priming experiments, participants' syntactic choices in picture description were influenced as strongly by previously comprehended anomalous (missing-verb) prime sentences as by well-formed prim...

Short utterance lacks enough discriminative information and its duration variation will propagate uncertainty into a probability linear discriminant analysis (PLDA) classifier. For speaker verification on short utterances, it can be considered as a domain with limited amount of long utterances. Therefore, transfer learning of PLDA can be adopted to learn discriminative information from other do...

This paper reports on the effects of an interactive software tool on the learning of Chinese tones by English-L1 learners of Chinese. The software enables students to listen to model utterances by native speakers of Chinese and to record their own renditions of those utterances. Simultaneously the F0 contours of both the model utterances and the student utterances are displayed on the computer ...

Meta-language utterances, i.e. utterances about other utterances, are ubiquitous in every type of human discourse, from unconstrained multi-party conversations to task-oriented man-machine dialogues. Several examples of meta-language communication are analyzed, identifying the complexities that a cognitively plausible discourse model should address. Meta-language utterances are investigated in ...

We present a tool that allows human wizards to select appropriate response utterances for a given dialogue context from a set of utterances observed in a dialogue corpus. Such a tool can be used in Wizard-of-Oz studies and for collecting data which can be used for training and/or evaluating automatic dialogue models. We also propose to incorporate such automatic dialogue models back into the to...

Italian speakers tend to stress the second component of German morphologically complex words such as compounds and prefix verbs even if the first component is lexically stressed. To improve their prosodic phrasing an automatic pronunciation teaching method was developed based on auditory feedback of prosodically corrected utterances in the learners’ own voices. Basically, the method copies cont...

In this paper, a detailed acoustic feature study of foreign accent using temporal features, intonation patterns, and frequency characteristics in American English is performed. Using a database which consists of words uttered in isolation, temporal features such as voice onset time, word-nal stop closure duration, and characteristics of duration are investigated. Accent diierences for native-pr...

The present experiment tested the suggestion that human listeners may exploit durational information in speech to parse continuous utterances into words. Listeners were presented with six-syllable unpredictable utterances under noise-masking, and were required to judge between alternative word strings as to which best matched the rhythm of the masked utterances. For each utterance there were fo...