The influence of pitch contour, segmental durations, and spectral features on the perception of two speaking styles was studied. For this purpose two male speakers each spoke “spontaneously” to an interviewer and afterwards read out their own literally transcribed spontaneous text. Pairs of identical spontaneous and read utterances were selected that were fluently spoken in both speaking styles...

With the acceleration of educational informatization, blended teaching mode has developed rapidly. In this context, grounded in Bandura's self-efficacy theory, study investigated relationship among students’ satisfaction with EFL class, speaking and achievement by means factor analysis, correlation analysis regression analysis. The results showed that, first there was a significant positive bet...

The present study investigated the extent to which native English listeners' perception of Japanese length contrasts can be modified with perceptual training, and how their performance is affected by factors that influence segment duration, which is a primary correlate of Japanese length contrasts. Listeners were trained in a minimal-pair identification paradigm with feedback, using isolated wo...

Donca Steriade " If phonological systems were seen as adaptations to universal performance constraints on speaking, listening and learning to speak, what would they be like? " Lindblom (1990: 102)

OBJECTIVE The purpose of the present study was to investigate tone production performance of native Mandarin Chinese speaking children with cochlear implants and to evaluate the effects of age at implantation and duration of implant use on tone production in those children. METHODS Fourteen prelingually deaf children who had received cochlear implantation and 14 age-matched normal-hearing chi...

Speaker verification performance is adversely affected by mismatches between training and testing data in intrinsic variations. This paper explores how recent technologies focused on modeling the total variability behave in addressing the effects of intrinsic variation in speaker verification. The effects of intrinsic variation are investigated from six aspects including speaking style, speakin...

The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of the instructional methods using web-based instruction (WBI) and cooperative learning (CL) on listening and speaking skills for Mandarin learning among non-Chinese learners at MARA University of Technology in Malaysia. The students’ performance on listening skill was tested by using a standardized listening test while the performance on ...

Although the operational scoring of the TOEFL iBT speaking section features the overall judgment of an examinee's speaking ability, the evaluation of specific components of speech such as delivery (pace and clarity of speech) and language use (vocabulary and grammar use) may be a promising approach to providing diagnostic information to learners. This study used an evidence-centered design appr...

This paper presents an approach to realizing various emotional expressions and speaking styles in synthetic speech using HMM-based speech synthesis. We show two methods for modeling speaking styles and emotions. In the first method, called “style dependent modeling,” each speaking style and emotion is individually modeled. On the other hand, in the second method, called “style mixed modeling,” ...