This paper argues that stylistically and pragmatically high-quality spoken language translation requires the transfer of pragmatic information at an abstract level of "utterance strategies". A new categorization of spoken language phenomena into essentially non-meaningful "speech errors", and purposeful "natural speech properties" is introduced, and the manner in which natural speech properties...

We present an automated method for estimating the difficulty of spoken texts for use in generating items that assess non-native learners’ listening proficiency. We collected information on the perceived difficulty of listening to various English monologue speech samples using a Likert-scale questionnaire distributed to 15 non-native English learners. We averaged the overall rating provided by t...

This paper argues that stylistically and pragmatically high-quality spoken language translation requires the transfer of pragmatic information at an abstract level of "utterance strategies". A new categorization of spoken language phenomena into essentially non-meaningful "speech errors", and purposeful "natural speech properties" is introduced, and the manner in which natural speech properties...

Post-filtering methods are used in mobile communications to improve the quality and intelligibility of speech. This paper introduces a noise-adaptive post-filtering algorithm that models the spectral effects observed in natural Lombard speech. The proposed method and another post-filtering technique were compared to unprocessed speech and natural Lombard speech in subjective listening tests in ...

The present research examined the effect of speech rate on listening comprehension of Iranian EFL learners. Initially, a sample of 108 sophomore EFL learners majoring in English translation was selected based on systematic random sampling from Abadan Islamic Azad University. Then, based on an ECCE proficiency test, 62 participants were chosen and divided into two homogeneous groups of 31. One g...

While TTS technology has come a long way, there is an ongoing need for bringing improved “naturalness” to synthesized speech. One predominant aspect of natural, spontaneous speech is the variability in it along several dimensions -in terms of vocabulary, prosodic features, paralinguistic elements and discourse markers. Such variability is typically carefully avoided or minimized in conventional...

Previous research has used both natural and simulated interactions to investigate the functions of infantdirected speech (IDS), but the effect of these approaches on the results of such studies is unclear. The aim of this study was to compare F(0) contours of natural and simulated speech directed to three distinct speech recipient groups to investigate the effects of different methodologies on ...

One of the largest challenges in speaker recognition is dealing with speaker-emotion variability problem. Nowadays, compensation techniques are the main solutions to this problem. In these methods, all kinds of speakers’ emotion speech should be elicited thus it is not user-friendly in the application. Therefore the basic problem is how to get the distribution of speakers’ emotion speech and ho...