While the characteristics of the amplitude spectrum of the voiced excitation have been studied widely both in natural and synthetic speech, the role of the excitation phase has remained less explored. Especially in speech synthesis, the phase information is often omitted for simplicity. This study investigates the impact of phase information of the excitation signal of voiced speech. The experi...

Two methods are presented for automatic calculation of the voice source parameters from continuous speech. Both methods are used to calculate the voice source parameters for natural speech. However, for natural speech no objective test proce dure seems available. Therefore, both methods were also tested on synthetic speech.

Much crosslinguistic research exists on the production and perception of voice onset time (VOT). However, most research on the perception of VOT uses synthetic stimuli instead of natural speech stimuli. Effects of synthetic speech on the perception of VOT are not known, but more research needs to be done to see if there are differences between perception using synthetic speech and perception us...

The Modified Rhyme Test (MRT), recorded using natural speech and two forms of synthetic speech, DECtalk and Votrax, was used to measure both open-set and closed-set speechrecognition performance. Performance of hearing-impaired elderly listeners was compared to two groups of young normal-hearing adults, one listening in quiet, and the other listening in a background of spectrally shaped noise d...

Communicative language use largely entails regular patterns consisting of pre-constructed phrases or sequences. These sequences have been examined by many researchers to find the situation-based formulas which may help L2 learners follow a possibly more target-like speaking system. This study, therefore, explored two categories of formulaic expressions including speech formulas and situation-bo...

Multi-channel speech enhancement with ad-hoc sensors has been a challenging task. Speech model guided beamforming algorithms are able to recover natural sounding speech, but the speech models tend to be oversimplified or the inference would otherwise be too complicated. On the other hand, deep learning based enhancement approaches are able to learn complicated speech distributions and perform e...

OBJECTIVE In response to the rapidly increasing interest in using human voice in cognitive brain research, a new method, semisynthetic speech generation (SSG), is presented for generation of speech stimuli. METHODS The method synthesizes speech stimuli as a combination of purely artificial processes and processes that originate from the natural human speech production mechanism. SSG first est...

This study evaluated the use of imagined interactions in speech research, by comparing speech addressed to imaginary speech partners with natural speech addressed to genuine interaction partners. Samples of speech directed to an imaginary infant (IDS), foreigner (FDS) and adult (ADS) produced by ten female students were acoustically analysed and also rated on positive vocal affect. Our results ...

In this paper, we investigate the effect of filled pauses, a discourse marker and silent pauses in a change detection experiment in natural, vocoded and synthetic speech. In natural speech change detection has been found to increase in the presence of filled pauses, we extend this work by replicating earlier findings and explore the effect of a discourse marker, like, and silent pauses. Further...

much attention has recently been paid to natural language processing in information storage and retrieval. this paper describes how the application of natural language processing ( nlp ) techniques can enhance cross-language information retrieval ( clir ). using a semi-experimental technique, we took farsi queries to retrieve relevant documents in english. for translating persian queries, we us...