The paper deals with perceived speech rhythm, starting from the observation that two nouns with a conjunction in between (‘X and/or Y’, cf. title) sound more rhythmical in a particular noun order. A perception experiment on German with real and pseudo nouns provides evidence that speech rhythm is not just created prosodically by means of high and low or long and short syllables, but that the ph...

This study presents the results of applying automated speech scoring technology to English spoken responses provided by non-native children in the context of an English proficiency assessment for middle school students. The assessment contains three diverse task types designed to measure a student’s English communication skills, and an automated scoring system was used to extract features and b...

Effects of age and speech rate on movement cycle duration were assessed using electromagnetic articulography. In a repetitive task syllables were articulated at eight rates, obtained by metronome and self-pacing. Results indicate that increased speech rate is associated with increasing movement cycle duration stability, while decreased rate leads to a decrease in uniformity of cycle duration, s...

The interest in text to speech synthesis increased in the world . text to speech have been developed for many popular languages such as English, Spanish and French and many researches and developments have been applied to those languages. Persian on the other hand, has been given little attention compared to other languages of similar importance and the research in Persian is still in its infan...

Today e-Learning is an important educational tool with multiple benefits. However, to be suitable for a large audience the learning objects, courses, and other forms of e-Learning content should be easy to use for all students, regardless of disability. This paper describes problems often encountered by a blind person using screen reader and voice synthesizer when using e-Learning systems, and ...

In this paper, we investigate the predictive power of different prosodic factorization schemes with respect to pitch movement. We will use this to propose an extension of a standard diphone database with diphones that have been recorded in different prosodic contexts. The goal of this research is to reduce the amount of pitch modification required, thereby improving the segmental quality of the...

Given that state of the art speech synthesis systems have already reached a high naturalness level, it is time to move to talking speech from the actual read speech framework. For this purpose it is thus necessary to investigate how disfluencies can be included in speech synthesis and even increase its naturalness. This paper builds on a previously presented work and focuses on finding a local ...

We give an overview of multilingual speech synthesis using the IPOX system. The first part discusses work in progress for various languages: Tashlhit Berber, Urdu and Dutch. The second part discusses a multilingual phonological grammar, which can be adapted to a particular language by setting parameters and adding languagespecific details.

This paper presents an intonation model which determines intonation contours over intonation phrases. The model is described by four elements: communicative type of an intonation phrase; number of accent groups in it; position of the nuclear accent group in it; and set of target intonation points. Individualization of the model is based on semiautomatic analysis of speaker database. The model w...