We describe a self-organising pseudo-articulatory speech production model (SPM) trained on an X-ray microbeam database, and present results when using the SPM within a speech recognition framework. Given a time-aligned phonemic string, the system uses an explicit statistical model of co-articulation to generate pseudoarticulator trajectories. From these, parametrised speech vectors are synthesi...

Cued Speech (CS) is a visual communication mode that makes use of hand shapes placed in different positions near the face in combination with the natural speech lipreading, to enhance speech perception from visual input. This system is based on the motions of the speaker’s hand moving in close relation with speech. In a CS system, hand shapes are designed to distinguish among consonants and han...

Perceptual learning, the improvement in sensory discriminations with practise, is also subject to stimulusspecific interference from temporal jitter in a learning session or manipulations applied between or immediately after sessions. We demonstrate a novel form of perceptual interference where even a brief cueing exposure to a complex speech-in-noise task produces a forward interference on sub...

Anchored in the view that users’ interaction with IT artifacts as social and interpersonal, this study introduces, defines, and examines the effects and consequences of perceived interdependence. This relational variable captures users’ perceptions of how they and the artifact influence each other’s experiences. The results of an experimental study reveal that users’ perceptions of their interd...

The processing of the relation between targets and distracters which underpins the impairment in memory for visually presented words when accompanied by semantically related auditory distracters—the between-sequence semantic similarity effect—might also disambiguate category membership of to-be-remembered words, bringing about improved memory for these words at recall. In this series of experim...

Human infants develop a variety of attentional mechanisms that allow them to extract relevant information from a cluttered world. We know that both social and non-social cues shift infants’ attention, but not how infants use these cues to learn basic events. With over 450 infants, four extensive eyetracking studies in this thesis established a controlled paradigm for investigating how attention...

Speech perception for both hearing and deaf people involves an integrative process between auditory and lip-reading information. In order to disambiguate information from lips, manual cues from Cued Speech may be added. Cued Speech (CS) is a system of manual aids developed to help deaf people to clearly and completely understand speech visually (Cornett, 1967). Within this system, both labial a...

Persons with auditory neuropathy/dys-synchrony display dys-synchronous peripheral neural function in the presence of intact outer hair cell function (e.g., Berlin et al., 1993; Starr et al., 1996). The majority of patients also report hearing difficulty characterized by difficulty understanding speech, particularly in background noise. Patients with AN/AD show variation along several dimensions...

Deaf children rely mainly on lipreading to understand spoken language. The phonological representations they develop from the lipread signal are underspecified, leading to poor performances in all mental activities relying on such representations. To overcome these difficulties, systems have been designed that deliver entirely visually specified information about the phonological contrasts of s...