This report describes a method for estimating the separation degree at the bunsetsu boundary (SD) for Japanese text-to-speech synthesis. Our method gives us the prosodic symbol without using complicated linguistic analysis. First we classify bunsetsus according to the nal morpheme. Each classi ed bunsetsu has a temporary separation degree in advance. We call this \the estimated separation degre...

This paper proposes a new concatenative speech synthesis method using context dependent phoneme sequences with variable length as search units. Using Japanese broadcast news programs as a speech database, we synthesize Japanese news sentences that are not included in that speech database and perform subjective evaluations of the synthesized speech. As a result, (1) 77% of speech synthesized by ...

This study investigates masking effects occurring during speech comprehension in the presence of concurrent speech signals. We examined the differential effects of acoustic–phonetic and lexical content of 4to 8-talker babble (natural speech) or babble-like noise (reversed speech) on word identification. Behavioral results show a monotonic decrease in speech comprehension rates with an increasin...

The perception of the distinction between /r/ and /l/ by native speakers of American English and of Japanese was studied using natural and synthetic speech. The American subjects were all nearly perfect at recognizing the natural speech sounds, whereas there was substantial variation among the Japanese subjects in their accuracy of recognizing /r/ and /l/ except in syllable-final position. A lo...

OBJECTIVE Behavioral experiments show that infants use both prosodic and statistical cues in acquiring language. However, it is not yet clear whether these prosodic and statistical tools are already present at birth. METHODS We recorded brain responses of sleeping newborns to natural sounds rich in prosody, namely singing and continuous speech, and to two impoverished manipulations of speech....

This is not a paper about mime or vocal impersonation; this is a paper about metaphor. In particular, it is about the metaphors linguists use in talking about language. I will try to characterize some of the axioms which underlie the metaphor systems of much of modern linguistics, which I will call ‘Physical Metaphors’ for reasons which will become clear shortly, and will provide some different...

We describe the 2012 release of our “Incremental Processing Toolkit” (INPROTK)1, which combines a powerful and extensible architecture for incremental processing with components for incremental speech recognition and, new to this release, incremental speech synthesis. These components work fairly domainindependently; we also provide example implementations of higher-level components such as nat...

In human-human dialogues, face-to-face meetings are often preferred over phone conversations. One explanation is that non-verbal modalities such as gesture provide additional information, making communication more efficient and accurate. If so, computer processing of natural language could improve by attending to non-verbal modalities as well. We consider the problem of sentence segmentation, u...