Previous work suggests that methods used in studying categorical perception for segmental contrasts may be useful in determining the representation of suprasegmental contrasts, particularly those based on intonational characteristics. This experiment investigated phonological representations for intonation contours in English by determining the extent of categorical effects in a task involving ...

Copyright 2009 by Helen Meng Abstract. We describe ongoing research in the development of speech technologies that strives to raise the efficacy of computer-aided pronunciation training, especially for Chinese learners of English. Our approach is grounded on the theory of language transfer and involves a systematic phonological comparison between the primary language (L1 being Chinese) and seco...

This study examined the phonological intuitions of adults by having them rate the phonological "goodness" of nonsense words. Subjects were asked to use a ten point scale to rate how "English-like" each stimulus, which was presented auditorily, sounded. The stimuli were phonotactically legal (in English) bisyllabic, CVCCVC nonsense words that varied in their phonotactic probability and primary s...

Echolalia is a pervasive phenomenon in verbal children with autism, traditionally conceived of as an automatic behavior with no communicative function. However, recently it has been shown that echoes may serve interactional goals. This article, which presents a case study of a six-year-old child with autism, examines how social interaction organizes autism echolalia and how repetitive speech re...

The transfer of sound from one language into another is not a uniform process, but rather, takes different forms depending on the orthographies and phonological properties of source and target languages, the less common of which involve processes significantly different from transliteration between European phonetic scripts. This paper pools techniques commonly used in loanword phonology and se...

The general goal of this study was to expand our understanding of what is meant by 'foreign accent'. More specifically, it deals with the role of prosody (timing and melody), which has rarely been examined. New technologies, including diphone speech synthesis (experiment 1) and speech manipulation (experiment 2), are used to study the relative importance of prosody in what is perceived as a for...

The focus of this study is the generation of expressive audiovisual speech from neutral utterances for 3D virtual actors. Taking into account the segmental and suprasegmental aspects of audiovisual speech, we propose and compare several computational frameworks for the generation of expressive speech and face animation. We notably evaluate a standard framebased conversion approach with two othe...