We present data on the pronunciation of oral and nasal vowels in northern and southern French varieties. In particular a sharp contrast exists in the fronting of the open /O/ towards [œ] in the North and the denasalisation of nasal vowels in the South. We examine how linguistic changes in progress may affect these vowels, which are governed by the left/right context and bring to light differenc...

A speaker’s accent is the most important factor affecting the performance of Natural Language Call Routing (NLCR) systems because accents vary widely, even within the same country or community. This variation also occurs when nonnative speakers start to learn a second language, the substitution of native language phonology being a common process. Such substitution leads to fuzziness between the...

This paper describes the construction and evaluation of a segmental duration prediction model for Greek language with the application of CART (Classification and Regression Tree) machine learning approach. A ToBI annotated prosodic speech corpus was utilized for the construction of training and testing sets. Our phoneme category was composed of 34 phonemes distributed in 32.072 instances (in 5....

Solving the task of phoneme recognition in music sound files may help for several practical applications: it enables lyrics transcription and as a consequence could provide further relevant information for the task of an automatic song classification. Beyond it can be used for lyrics alignment e.g. in karaoke applications. The effect of both different feature signal representations as well as t...

The aim of this study was to determine if two dimensions of song, the phonological part of lyrics and the melodic part of tunes, are processed in an independent or integrated way. In a series of five experiments, musically untrained participants classified bi-syllabic nonwords sung on two-tone melodic intervals. Their response had to be based on pitch contour, on nonword identity, or on the com...

Previous studies suggest fundamental differences between the perceptual learning of speech and non-speech stimuli. One major difference is in the way variability in the training set affects learning and its generalization to untrained stimuli: training-set variability appears to facilitate speech learning, while slowing or altogether extinguishing non-speech auditory learning. We asked whether ...

We investigated with fMRI whether different lateralization types of cortical activation in prosodic tasks are caused by different stress-related coping strategies. After classifying healthy women as high or low repressive they performed four different identification tasks with acoustically presented speech material while being in the MR scanner. The two materials presented in blocks were emotio...

The bandwidth for telephony is generally defined to be from 300–3400 Hz. This bandwidth restriction has a noticeable effect on speech quality. We present an algorithm which recovers the missing highband parts from telephone speech. We describe an MMSE estimator using hard/soft-classification to create the missing highband spectrum envelope. The classification is motivated by acoustic phonetics:...