I have proposed a method for detecting local slower phrases in Japanese spontaneous conversational speech. A threshold is applied to phrase-averaged mora duration in this method. It is considered that relative variation of time sequence of phrase-averaged mora duration should be taken into account for detecting slower phrases correctly. In this paper, preliminary experiments are carried out to ...

Effect of speaking rate on phone duration was investigated to improve a Computer-Aided Language Learning (CALL) system that teaches Japanese double-mora phoneme pronunciation [1]. The influence of the speaking rate was formulated as a linear regression line for each phone, based on the analysis results of a male speaker’s non-sense word utterances. The formulations were used to develop a method...

1. Introduction In human communication, speech conveys not only linguistic information but also emphasis, intention, attitude and so on. They are called paralinguistic information [1]. There are several researches on paralinguistic information [2,3]. Methods for modeling or detecting of paralinguistic information is useful for various application in man-machine communication such as speech synt...

Fundamental investigations about differential limen (DL) for word-based speech rate variations in Japanese are described. We carry out auditory tests with stimuli made by equally lengthening or shortening a duration of a word in a sentence. We set up the experiments to diffuse the subjects' focus of attention. When the focus is diffused, the DL value of acceleration increases in several cases. ...

Previous studies showed that the time-expanded speech signal and the cue of moving image of talker’s face improve speech intelligibility. Sakamoto et al. (2008) investigated the detection thresholds of auditory-visual asynchrony for timeexpanded speech and a moving image of the talker’s face. Their results showed that detection thresholds in longer words were higher than those for shorter words...

This paper considers the state observer problem for a class of nonlinear systems, which present multiple non commensurate time delays as well as distributed delay terms. The proposed algorithm is an extension of the observer for nonlinear delayless systems proposed in 1993 by Ciccarella, Dalla Mora, Germani. It is proved that a suitable gain can be easily chosen such that the observation error ...

Ternary stress is a unique challenge to constraint-based metrical stress theories: how to model ternarity without ternary feet (Halle & Vergnaud 1987; Levin 1988; Dresher & Lahiri 1991; Rice 1992) or ternaryspecific constraints that prohibit adjacent feet (Kager 1994; Houghton 2008). While ternary rhythm exists, we propose that ternary feet do not, not even indirectly by means of recursion (pac...

This paper analyses H(igh) tone shift and spreading in Koshikijima Japanese, a highly endangered language spoken in the south of Japan. It is a moraic language as opposed to a syllabic one where an H tone is placed on a certain mora by counting the number of moras from the end of the word. However, this moraic principle is often violated if the H tone is assigned by rule to the second, i.e. non...

The paper summarises results of an investigation of the durational correlates of word stress in Finnish, to be reported in more detail elsewhere. It was observed that segments and syllables have a reliably longer duration when they occur within the domain of the word’s first two morae than when they occur outside this domain. The most conspicuous concomitant of primary stress is the durational ...

We study on a syllable-based acoustic modeling method for Japanese spontaneous speech recognition. Traditionally, mora-based acoustic models have been adopted for Japanese read speech recognition systems. In this paper, syllable-based unit and mora-based unit are clearly distinguished in their definition, and syllables are shown to be more suitable as an acoustic model for Japanese spontaneous ...