Down Syndrome (DS) is a frequent genetic disorder that has systematic consequences on speech articulation. The acoustic properties of speech production of people with DS have been poorly investigated in speech research. This paper reports on an acoustic analysis of vowels produced by eight native speakers of French with DS in VowelConsonant-Vowel (VCV) contexts. We observed more variability in ...

Program synthesis by examples is more convenient than using conventional techniques, since it only requires examples instead of a detailed speci cation. In spite of this convenience, relatively little research in this type of synthesis has so far been carried out. A major obstacle is that, due to the similarity-based and data-driven features of this technique, many examples and considerable com...

Novel view synthesis using image-based priors has recently been shown to provide high quality renderings of complex 3D scenes. However, current methods are extremely slow, requiring of the order of hours to render a single frame. In this paper we show how a coarse-to-fine method can be used to reduce this time significantly. In contrast to traditional multiple-view stereo methods, devising a co...

This paper reports an experiment in synthesizing French connected speech using Maeda’s digital simulation of the vocaltract system. The dynamics of the vocal-tract shape are estimated from the dynamics of Electromagnetic Articulograph (EMA) sensors via Maeda’s geometrical articulatory model. Time-varying characteristics of the glottis and the velopharyngeal port are set using empirical rules, w...

Herein, recent developments in the production and reactivity of distonic radical anions are reviewed. Known and potential reactions utilizing both the radical and anion centers are highlighted. While work has revealed new distonic radical anion species, limited effort has been to apply them to complex molecule synthesis. Through the development of new photoinduced electron transfer reagents, di...

A new modality for chemical synthesis on a drop scale which employs a piezoelectric chip as the reactor and surface acoustic waves (SAWs) as the source of energy (and consequent heating) is described.

Although electronic speech synthesis by now has a tradition of several decades, there is still no agreement on the most preferable structure for a speech synthesizer. In this paper we will compare several structures that have been used by workers in the field. As these all appear to have some drawbacks, we will propose an alternative structure that should solve at least some of the problems. Th...

Concatenating units of natural speech is one method of speech synthesis. Most such systems use an inventory of xed length units, typically diphones or triphones with one instance of each type. An alternative is to use more varied, non-uniform units extracted from large speech databases containing multiple instances of each. The greater variability in such natural speech segments allows closer m...

This paper describes the first Text-to-Speech (TTS) system for the Mongolian language, using the general speech synthesis architecture of Festival. The TTS is based on diphone concatenative synthesis, applying TD-PSOLA technique. The conversion process from input text into acoustic waveform is performed in a number of steps consisting of functional components. Procedures and functions for the s...

The aim of our study was to investigate whether children distinguish between ‘new’ and ‘given’ information via phonetic reduction in spontaneous speech in a similar way to adults. An interactive ‘spot the difference’ game was used to elicit spontaneous speech. Word duration, fundamental frequency and vowel formant frequencies in repeated content words relative to when they were mentioned for th...