The present study examines the relative impact of segments and intonation on accentedness, comprehensibility, and intelligibility, specifically investigating the separate contribution of segmental and intonational information to perceived foreign accent in Korean-accented English. Two English speakers and two Korean speakers recorded 40 English sentences. The sentences were manipulated by combi...

The present study investigated the effect of using PRAAT as a free computer software package for the scientific analysis of speech in phonetics on pre-intermediate Iranian English as foreign language (EFL) learners’ supra segmental features (i.e., intonation and stress). The design of the study was a Quasi-experimental research design with a pre and post-test. In doing so...

This paper describes an eye tracking experiment to study the processing of diphone synthesis, unit selection synthesis, and human speech taking segmental and suprasegmental speech quality into account. The results showed that both factors influenced the processing of human and synthetic speech, and confirmed that eye tracking is a promising albeit time consuming research method to evaluate synt...

Incremental speech synthesis aims at delivering the synthetic voice while the sentence is still being typed. One of the main challenges is the online estimation of the target prosody from a partial knowledge of the sentence’s syntactic structure. In the context of HMM-based speech synthesis, this typically results in missing segmental and suprasegmental features, which describe the linguistic c...

This study is the third in a series that has explored the source of intelligibility decrement in dysarthria by jointly considering signal characteristics and the cognitive-perceptual processes employed by listeners. A paradigm of lexical boundary error analysis was used to examine this interface by manipulating listener constraints with a brief familiarization procedure. If familiarization allo...

This paper investigates the classification of different emotional states using speech features from different feature groups. We use both suprasegmental feature groups like pitch, energy, and duration and segmental feature groups like voice quality, zero crossing rate, and articulation. We want to exploit the selection of the most relevant features from these different feature groups to get a b...

For optimal word recognition listeners should use all relevant acoustic information as soon as it comes available. Using printed-word eye tracking we investigated when during word processing Dutch listeners use suprasegmental lexical stress information to recognize words. Fixations on targets such as "OCtopus" (capitals indicate stress) were more frequent than fixations on segmentally overlappi...

Automatically evaluating pronunciation quality of non-native speech has seen tremendous success in both research and commercial settings, with applications in L2 learning. In this paper, submitted for the INTERSPEECH 2015 Degree of Nativeness Sub-Challenge, this problem is posed under a challenging crosscorpora setting using speech data drawn from multiple speakers from a variety of language ba...