This paper describes our participation in the interactive track (ChiSwe Group) of the Social Book Search lab organized at CLEF 2016. This is our first participation in CLEF SBS interactive track. A total of 112 participants (29 native Chinese speakers 27 native English speakers, and 56 native speakers of other languages) participated in the SBS Interactive Track. We found that native Chinese sp...

SUMMARY The present study investigated the effect of tonal changes on voice onset time (VOT) between normal laryngeal (NL) and superior esophageal (SE) speakers of Mandarin Chinese. VOT values were measured from the syllables /pha/, /tha/, and /kha/ produced at four tone levels by eight NL and seven SE speakers who were native speakers of Mandarin. Results indicated that Mandarin tones were ass...

English vowel productions were acoustically examined in a group of native Mandarin speakers. The first and second formant frequencies (F1 & F2) of 11 English vowels were examined in the syllable-level productions of 40 Mandarin speakers compared to 40 American English speakers. Results of the comparative acoustic analysis indicated that the Mandarin speakers differed significantly from the Amer...

English lexical stress is multidimensional in nature and acoustically related to combination of fundamental frequency (F0), duration, intensity and vowel quality. Errors in any or all of these correlates could interfere with perception of the stress contrast, but it is unknown which correlates are most difficult for Bengali speakers to acquire. This study compares the use of these correlates in...

Speech and prosody-voice profiles for 15 male speakers with High-Functioning Autism (HFA) and 15 male speakers with Asperger syndrome (AS) were compared to one another and to profiles for 53 typically developing male speakers in the same 10- to 50-years age range. Compared to the typically developing speakers, significantly more participants in both the HFA and AS groups had residual articulati...

Acoustic characteristics of American English sentence stress produced by native Mandarin speakers are reported. Fundamental frequency (F0), vowel duration, and vowel intensity in the sentence-level stress produced by 40 Mandarin speakers were compared to those of 40 American English speakers. Results obtained from two methods of stress calculation indicated that Mandarin speakers of American En...

Visual information about lip and facial movements plays a role in audiovisual (AV) speech perception. Although this has been widely confirmed, previous behavioural studies have shown interlanguage differences, that is, native Japanese speakers do not integrate auditory and visual speech as closely as native English speakers. To elucidate the neural basis of such interlanguage differences, 22 na...

conversations contain spontaneous use of routine formulas which lets speaker sinteract with each other to express opinions. gambits, as one of these formulas, act as an opening remark and help speakers to maintain the smooth flow of an everyday conversation. the lack of mastery of using gambits in maintaining the conversation leads to breakdowns in speaking. this paper aimedat comparingthe use ...

Listeners posses a remarkable ability to attend to one of two speakers speaking at the same time (simultaneous speakers). The present research studied the role of speech rhythm involved in this process. In two experiments with the Coordinate Measure Response Corpus, listeners were asked to attend to one of two simultaneous speakers. In Experiment I native and French accented speakers of English...