Silence is an integral part of the most frequent turn-taking phenomena in spoken conversations. Silence is sized and placed within the conversation flow and it is coordinated by the speakers along with the other speech acts. The objective of this analytical study is twofold: to explore the functions of silence with duration of one second and above, towards information flow in a dyadic conversat...

RNA interference (RNAi) is an ancient and evolutionarily conserved process. In some eukaryotes, RNAi silences parasitic genetic elements. In plants, RNAi serves as an immune system against RNA viruses and transgenes and in worms, RNAi silences transposons. In mammals, RNAi has yet unknown functions. However, emerging roles for short RNAs and the factors that interact with them in other eukaryot...

An acoustic-phonetic featureand knowledge-based system for the automatic segmentation, broad categorization and fine phoneme recognition of continuous speech is described. The system uses an auditory-based front-end processing and incorporates new knowledge-based algorithms to automatically segments the speech into phoneme-like segments that are further categorized into 4 main categories: sonor...

This position paper suggests a novel approach to enhancing productivity for professionals whose core business is deep thinking, by manipulation of the sonic environment. Approaching the issue from the perspective of sound-design, it proposes the composition and algorithmic generation of background soundscapes that promote a psychological state of flow [1], and can become mentally associated wit...

Disfluency, such as pause (silences), filled pause (e.g., ‘um’, ‘uh’), repetition (e.g., ‘the the’) and cutoff word (e.g., ‘hori[zontal]-’), is a common part of human speech that occurs at a rate of 6 to 10 per 100 words [2, 5]. According to one model of speech production [8], there are two types of disfluency: disfluency at the internal planning stage (e.g., wordretrieval difficulties), and di...

WASHINGTON (A P) Republican congressional leaders said yesterday that President Reagan gave them no encouragem en t w hen they proposed cu tting Social Security and o th e r open-ended benefit p rogram s this year in o rder to hold dow n the federal deficit. O ne called th e proposal, “just barely an open question .” A nother said it “should be put to res t” for this year, despite w hat w ere d...