Speech processing requires the temporal parsing of syllable order. Individuals suffering from posterior left hemisphere brain injury often exhibit temporal processing deficits as well as language deficits. Although the right posterior inferior parietal lobe has been implicated in temporal order judgments (TOJs) of visual information, there is limited evidence to support the role of the left inf...

Concatenative speech synthesis using phoneme, di-phone and allophone as an elementary unit for Hindi speech synthesis requires significant quality improvement. The naturalness of the state of the art waveform synthesizer is attributed due to the use of syllable as a basic unit. The primary reason for choosing the syllable as a basic unit is that the Indian languages are syllable centered. This ...

This paper shows how phonological structures can be culturally selected so as to become learnable and adapted to the ecological niche formed by the brains and bodies of speakers. A computational model of the cultural formation of syllable systems illustrates how general learning and physical biases can influence the evolution of the structure of vocalization systems. We use the artificial life ...

Syllable contact pairs cross-linguistically tend to have a falling sonority slope, a constraint which is called the Syllable Contact Law (SCL). In this study, the phonotactics of syllable contacts in 4202 CVC.CVC words of Persian lexicon is investigated. The consonants of Persian were divided into five sonority categories and the frequency of all possible sonority slopes is computed both in lex...

This paper presents a novel technique for building a syllable based continuous speech recognizer when unannotated transcribed train data is available. We present two different segmentation algorithms to segment the speech and the corresponding text into comparable syllable like units. A group delay based two level segmentation algorithm is proposed to extract accurate syllable units from the sp...

The Neoštokavian dialect of Croatian belongs to the somewhat obscure category of pitch accent languages,1 making use of both tone and another type of prominence, usually termed stress, in wordlevel prosody (Babić, 1988; van der Hulst & Smith, 1988; Bethin, 1994; Inkelas & Zec, 1988; Zec, 1992, 1999). The interaction between tone and stress yields four accents, traditionally called long falling ...

A study on introducing prosodic information to acoustic modeling (AM) for speech recognition is reported in this paper. It extends the conventional context-dependent (CD) triphone HMM modeling approach to further consider the dependency of phone model on the break type of nearby inter-syllable boundary. Four break types are considered, including major break, minor break, normal non-break, and t...

Previous studies of duration variation in syllable constituents have yielded results for Polish which are clear outliers in relation to those for other languages. We report on a study of this issue in the context of TTS development, using a large annotated database. Global and local duration distance measures are applied to phoneme and syllable level units, and generalised iambic and trochaic d...

Nasalisation is examined in languages of the Vanimo coast area of New Guinea. We find evidence that in some languages the specification [± nasal] is applied to each segment; there are both underlyingly oral and nasal vowels, and oral and nasal voiced stops. Other languages show a [± nasal] contrast at a syllable level: nasalisation is realised on a syllable, and there are no segments which are ...

A production study was conducted to investigate the effect of focus on the temporal structure of Swedish two-syllable words. Speakers read aloud simple three-word sentences with systematic variation of the position of focus in the syntactic structure. All the words in each sentence had the same word accent, either acute or grave and they were all two-syllable non-compounds. In general, focus on...