Testing the comprehension of spoken language is of primary importance. A lot of factors may affect the performance of EFL learners on listening comprehension tests, among which are the use of visual advance organizers, and types of listening passages (dialogues or monologues). As B-Ikeguchi (1997) states a few studies have been carried out on the effects of these factors on EFL learners’ listen...

This paper presents an architecture for the generation of spoken monologues with contextually appropriate intonation. A twotiered information structure representation is used in the high-level content planning and sentence planning stages of generation to produce e cient, coherent speech that makes certain discourse relationships, such as explicit contrasts, appropriately salient. The system is...

In this paper a method for speech output generation in data-to-speech systems is proposed, called phrase concatenation, which tries to nd a balance between naturalness and exibility of the speech output. The GoalGetter system , which generates spoken monologues on football matches, serves as an example. The phrase concatenation technique involves concatenating prerecor-ded words and phrases, wh...

From the perspective of narrative voice in female narratology, this paper first explores silenced women, who lose right to voice, and narrators, control over Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues. However, despite their inferiority which is what modern feminists fight obtain, both those characters narrators represent a small precious victory for power. Silenced women show power make men fear lo...

This paper presents an acoustic study of spontaneous and read Italian speech based on the analysis of monologues and corresponding read transcribed texts, each produced by three different subjects. The speaking styles were examined in terms of articulation, speech, fluency and word rate indices; typology of pauses and their cooccurrence; mean and range of F0 values; classification of phonetic e...

The aim of the study is to explore the prosodic patterns spontaneous lecture speech vs. read speech to show where and how these monologues differ and why by analyzing perceived emphasis and its acoustic features within and between speech paragraphs. Systematic but distinct patterns are found for both speech types in emphasis distribution across speech, overall and local tempo modulations. Read ...

The study aims at fathoming Robert Browning’ and Lowell’s intentions of choosing the dramatic monologue as a means exploring human psyche. Significantly, themes insanity murder are not ideal from an esthetic perspective, but for Browning Lowell it provides key to probe into character fundamental motives. This examines monologues that address crime psyche abnormal men. poetry in this regard unra...