ABSTRACT Purpose: to develop lists of sentences in Brazilian Portuguese based on daily vocabulary evaluate auditory speech perception children. Methods: a corpus with adaptations attend the criteria established for this study and analyzed by judges was used obtain sentences. Thirty-seven lists, each composed thirteen fifty phonological keywords, were constructed. The material presented ten chil...

Dysarthria is a motor speech disorder characterized by weakness, paralysis, or poor coordination of the muscles responsible for speech. Although automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have been developed for disordered speech, factors such as low intelligibility and limited vocabulary decrease speech recognition accuracy. In this paper, we introduce a technique that can increase recognition...

Many studies have shown the advantage of using ideal binary masking (IdBM) to improve the intelligibility of speech corrupted by interfering maskers. Given the fact that amplitude and phase are two important acoustic cues for speech perception, the present work further investigated the relative contributions of these two cues to the intelligibility advantage of IdBM-processed sentences. Three t...

This paper proposes a way of preparing and recording a speech corpus for unit selection text-to-speech speech synthesis driven by symbolic prosody. The research is focused on a phonetically and prosodically rich sentence selection algorithm. Symbolic description on a deep prosody level is used to enrich the phonetic representation of sentences (by respecting the prosodeme types phones appear in...

Normal-hearing (NH) listeners make use of context, speech redundancy and top-down linguistic processes to perceptually restore inaudible or masked portions of speech. Previous research has shown poorer perception and restoration of interrupted speech in CI users and NH listeners tested with acoustic simulations of CIs. Three hypotheses were investigated: (1) training with CI simulations of inte...

Prosody generation engine which is is responsible for the naturalness of the synthetic speech, remains one of the most important component of a Text-to-Speech synthesis system. In this paper we present an innovative algorithm for modelling the fundamental frequency F0 for the Greek language, for sentences containing emphatic segments. The main idea of our approach is the definition of a specifi...

It has been argued by LaPolla (1993, 1995) and Van Valin and LaPolla (1997) -among others -that word order in Mandarin Chinese (henceforth MC) is (almost) exclusively determined by informational/communicative considerations. Though it cannot be denied that word order does encode informative/communicative considerations such as identifiability, foregrounding, and focalization, it is argued here ...

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) compact disc (VA-CD) Tonal and Speech Materials for Auditory Perceptual Assessment, Disc 1.0 contains three dichotic speech tests. Two of them, namely, dichotic digits and dichotic synthetic sentences, are tasks that are easily and accurately performed by young normal listeners. The third test, dichotic nonsense syllables, is a more difficult task for nor...