The speech rate is one of the important prosodic parameters for the naturalness and intelligibility of an utterance. On the basis of the authors’ definition of the relative local speech rate, the present paper describes an analysis of the effects of changes in global speech rate, syntactic constituency and lexical accent on the local speech rate, using short utterances in which these factors ar...

Speech rate is one of the salient characteristics that speakers modify their speech for second or foreign language learners to gain more comprehensive input (Krashen, 1987). For young EFL learners, a slower can be critical factor helps them properly process linguistic and increase self-confidence in listening comprehension. The present study investigated effect on comprehension performance amon...

Hidden Markov Model is a popular statisical method that is used in continious and discrete speech recognition. The probability density function of observation vectors in each state is estimated with discrete density or continious density modeling. The performance (in correct word recognition rate) of continious density is higher than discrete density HMM, but its computation complexity is very ...