The author presents a system for speech synthesis that selects and concatenates speech segments (units) of various size from an adequately prepared audio-visual speech database. The audio and the video track of selected segments are used together in concatenation to preserve audio-visual correlations. The input text is converted into a target phone chain and the database is searched for appropr...

the purpose of this research was to analyze efl writing tasks in the most popular esol (english for speakers of other languages) exam preparation courses in iran: ielts, toefl, fce and cae. having collected the criteria of writing task appropriateness in light of the process-oriented approach to writing instruction, 114 learner participants were asked to rate efl writing tasks based on a checkl...

In the McGurk effect, perceptual identification of auditory speech syllables is influenced by simultaneous presentation of discrepant visible speech syllables. This effect has been found in subjects of different ages and with various native language backgrounds. But no McGurk tests have been conducted with prelinguistic infants. In the present series of experiments, 5-month-old English-exposed ...

Synesthesia entails a special kind of sensory perception, where stimulation in one sensory modality leads to an internally generated perceptual experience of another, not stimulated sensory modality. This phenomenon can be viewed as an abnormal multisensory integration process as here the synesthetic percept is aberrantly fused with the stimulated modality. Indeed, recent synesthesia research h...

Visually impaired or blind people faced tremendous challenges daily in accessing the information while on the move or during communicating with the world around them. They had to depend on their sighted colleagues, friends, relatives, or the people on the road to help them with locating places. Our Location Based Information System is such a location based application that works as an audio roa...

In this research we implemented three different methods for presenting scientific graphs to blind and visually impaired people. Each rendering method employed either audition, kinesthetic or a combination of those two modalities. In order to allow for distance learning, we have used low cost portable devices for the output graph rendering. The three modes of representation were then compared by...

With the increase in number of sensory substitution devices, engineering community is confronted with a new challenge: ensuring user training safe virtual environments before using these devices real-life situations. We developed game that uses an original sonification model, which, although not specific to certain device, can be effective means for orientation space based on audio stimuli. Thu...