This paper describes the latest progress in the development of a text-to-speech system for Portuguese. The system comprises 4 major modules: text normalization, linguistic and phonetic processing, generation of the synthesizer parameters and synthesis. The present rule-based version, based on the Klatt80 formant synthesizer, has achieved promising results, namely in what concerns the performanc...

This paper presents a constraint model for the interpretation of multilinear representations of speech utterances which can provide important fine-grained information for speech recognition applications. The model uses explicit structural constraints specifying overlap and precedence relations between features in both the phonological and the phonetic domains in order to recognise well-formed s...

The phonetic inventories of 13 Italian children at 18, 21, 24 and 27 months of age are presented. The children were taperecorded during a play interaction with the mother, and their vocalizations were phonetically transcribed. The individual phonetic inventories were calculated by applying the criteria put forward by Stoel-Gammon [1]: a consonantal singleton or cluster was attested only if word...

We present a phonetic algorithm that fuses existing techniques and introduces new features. This combination offers improved precision and recall.

Prosodic structure encodes grouping of words into hierarchically layered prosodic constituents, including the prosodic word, intermediate phrase (ip) and intonational phrase (IP). This paper investigates the phonetic encoding of prosodic structure from a corpus of scripted broadcast news speech through analysis of the acoustic correlates of prosodic boundary at three levels of prosodic structur...

Methods and results Geneva prison (for men and women) has 300 beds and serves as a remand prison and for short and medium term sentences. One fifth of the prisoners are dependent on opiates at entry. For our study we cross checked prison medical records with medicolegal necropsv reports in the Canton of Geneva. During 1982-6, 102 sudden deaths among former prisoners were recorded, of which a la...

Intelligent Design Theory (ID) has been much maligned recently as Neo-Creationist pseudoscience. This paper looks briefly at the common arguments used against ID, including arguments from methodological naturalism (MN), falsifiability, productivity, and religious fundamentalism. Ultimately it goes on to explain why the theory could be beneficial to our society today and suggests a need for a me...

Methodological dualism in linguistics occurs when its theories are subjected to standards that are inappropriate for them qua scientifi c theories. Despite much opposition, methodological dualism abounds in contemporary thinking. In this paper, I treat linguistics as a scientifi c activity and explore some instances of dualism. By extracting some ubiquitous aspects of scientifi c methodology fr...

This paper is concerced with the use of error back-propagation in phonetic classification. Our objective is to investigate the basic characteristics of back-propagation, and study how the framework of multi-layer perceptrons can be exploited in phonetic recognition. We explore issues such as integration of heterogeneous sources of information, conditioll~ that can affect performance of phonetic...