The aim of the research was to investigate the effects of divergent selection on some production and clutch traits in Japanese quail (Coturnix coturnix japonica). Over 5 generations divergently selected two Japanese quail lines (HBW: High Body Weight and LBW: Low Body Weight) and control line (C) that derivate from a base random bred population were used in this study. Weight of first egg, age ...

It has recently been suggested that speakers vary in the amount of speech planning and that the scope of planning is influenced by taskand speaker specific constraints. To test this, an experiment is presented examining the effects of linguistic structure and working memory on speech planning, as evidenced in pause duration and F0 peaks. Twenty speakers of German performed two tasks. In the fir...

It has long been noted that conversational partners tend to exhibit increasingly similar pitch, intensity, and timing behavior over the course of a conversation. However, the metrics developed to measure this similarity to date have generally failed to capture the dynamic temporal aspects of this process. In this paper, we propose new approaches to measuring interlocutor similarity in spoken di...

We have been attempting to realize simultaneous machine interpretation. However, determining the interpreting utterance timing is as difficult as determining translation units. This remains a major concern for the development of such a speech translation system. It is also crucial for the system’s users that the speech generated by the system is clear and easy to listen to. In this paper, we fo...

This paper reports a speech production experiment in which the effects of surrounding phrase lengths and head-argument distance on intra-sentential pause duration were tested. While the results confirm an effect of phrase length on pausing, this effect is found to be distinctly stronger for long phrases preceding the pause than for long upcoming phrases. The results are discussed with respect t...

Control of pause occurrence and duration is an important issue for text-to-speech synthesis systems. In text-readout speech, pauses occur unconditionally at sentence boundaries and with high probability at major syntactic boundaries such as clause boundaries, but more or less arbitrarily at minor syntactic boundaries. Pause duration tends to be longer at the end of a longer syntactic unit. A de...

Pauses are known to be good indicators of cognitive demand in monolingual language production and in translation. However, a previous effort by O’Brien (2006) to establish an analogous relationship in post-editing did not produce the expected result. In this case study, we introduce a metric for pause activity, the average pause ratio, which is sensitive to both the number and duration of pause...

The present study was undertaken to demonstrate and characterize potentiation of ventricular overdrive suppression by adenosine. To substantiate that adenosine has an enhanced effect on overdrive suppression, it would be necessary to demonstrate that adenosine increases pause duration independent of slowing spontaneous pre-drive rate. In isolated perfused guinea pig hearts with surgically induc...