This paper presents a new classification algorithm for realtime inference of emotions from the non-verbal features of speech. It identifies simultaneously occurring emotional states by recognising correlations between emotions and features such as pitch, loudness and energy. Pairwise classifiers are constructed for nine classes from the Mind Reading emotion corpus, yielding an average cross-val...

The different level of transparency of letter-sound mapping in various orthographies has been found to influence reading development across languages. The Hebrew orthography represents a special case of within language design with two versions of the script, a transparent (vowelized) and an opaque one (unvowelized). In this study we conducted a within and between comparison of word reading flue...

The present study aimed to investigate the development of visual speech perception in Chinese-speaking children. Children aged 7, 13 and 16 were asked to visually identify both consonant and vowel sounds in Chinese as quickly and accurately as possible. Results revealed (1) an increase in accuracy of visual speech perception between ages 7 and 13 after which the accuracy rate either stagnates o...

over the last few years, role of computers has become a controversial issue in language learning. this study was designed to examine the impact of computer anxiety and computer self-efficacy on the speaking section of the toefl ibt test taken by intermediate efl learners. the researchers intended to find out, which var- iable i.e. computer anxiety and/or self-efficacy would result in better per...

english passive has always been regarded as a challenge by farsi-speaking efl learners. despite the presence of many linguistic and pedagogical approaches in studying and teaching english passive, there still appears to be a pedagogical gap facing farsi-speaking efl learners dealing with this construction. taking up the cognitive-construction grammar perspective, the present article aims to inv...

This paper reports various investigations on recognizing spontaneous presentation speech in connection with the “Spontaneous Speech” national project started in 1999. Presentation speech uttered by 10 male speakers of approximately 4.5 hours duration has been recognized. Experimental results show that acoustic and language modeling based on an actual spontaneous speech corpus is far more effect...

Piecewise linear models (PLMs) have been widely used in many enterprise machine learning problems, which assign linear experts to individual partitions on feature spaces and express whole models as patches of local experts. This paper addresses simultaneous model selection issues of PLMs; partition structure determination and feature selection of individual experts. Our contributions are mainly...

We investigate the use of prosody for the detection of frustration and annoyance in natural human-computer dialog. In addition to prosodic features, we examine the contribution of language model information and speaking “style”. Results show that a prosodic model can predict whether an utterance is neutral versus “annoyed or frustrated” with an accuracy on par with that of human interlabeler ag...

We investigate the use of prosody for the detection of frustration and annoyance in natural human-computer dialog. In addition to prosodic features, we examine the contribution of language model information and speaking “style”. Results show that a prosodic model can predict whether an utterance is neutral versus “annoyed or frustrated” with an accuracy on par with that of human interlabeler ag...