We evaluated two speech research paradigms by comparing standardized sentences to ‘free speech’ (both produced by students without interaction partner). Samples of infant(IDS), foreigner(FDS) and adult-directed speech (ADS) were acoustically analyzed for F0 and hyperarticulation. No difference for hyperarticulation was found between IDS, FDS and ADS, which is in contrast to natural speech and i...

This article reports the results of two experiments in which factors such as duration, amplitude and noise are manipulated, in order to achieve more natural utterances in synthetic speech. The participants were native speakers of English, instructed to judge the naturalness of the different versions of utterances generated throughout the manipulations. The results indicate that there are signif...

The overall goal of this project is to integrate speech and natural language knowledge sources to build a speech understanding system for human-machine communication using spoken English. The speech knowledge sources use acoustic models based on hidden Markov modeling techniques. The natural language knowledge sources use a Unification grammar formalism for describing the syntax of English, a h...

The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) Approach claims that there are some universalities in all languages. Speech acts seem to be present in all languages, but considering this approach, research has not indicated whether request speech act differs from one language to another. Thus, this study intended to investigate whether request strategies are used differently in English and Persian roma...

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In face-to-face conversation speech is perceived by ear and eye. We studied the prerequisites of audio-visual speech perception by using perceptually ambiguous sine wave replicas of natural speech as auditory stimuli. When the subjects were not aware that the auditory stimuli were speech, they showed only negligible integration of auditory and visual stimuli. When the same subjects learned to p...

This article discusses speech production in dialogue from the perspective of natural language generation focusing on the selec tion of appropriate intonation We argue that in order to assign ap propriate intonation contours in speech producing systems it is vital to acknowledge the diversity of functions that intonation ful lls and to account for communicative and immediate contexts as major fa...

In face-to-face conversation speech is perceived by ear and eye. We studied the prerequisites of audio-visual speech perception by using perceptually ambiguous sine wave replicas of natural speech as auditory stimuli. When the subjects were not aware that the auditory stimuli were speech, they showed only negligible integration of auditory and visual stimuli. When the same subjects learned to p...

The synthesis of near-to-natural F0 contours is an important issue in text-to-speech and crucial to the naturalness and intelligibility of synthetic speech. In earlier studies of the first author a model of German intonation was developed that is based on the quantitative Fujisaki-model. The current paper addresses a perception experiment comparing a TTS-system incorporating this new approach w...

The quality of static phones (e.g. vowels, fricatives, nasals, laterals) generated by articulatory speech synthesizers has reached a high level in the last years. Our goal is to expand this high quality to dynamic speech, i.e. whole syllables, words, and utterances by re-synthesizing natural acoustic speech data. Re-synthesis means that vocal tract action units or articulatory gestures, describ...