making capital and investment is the main driving forces of economic development. based on the investment sensitivity to the changes of some of macro-economic variables and risk and uncertainty, the present study evaluated the effective factors on investment in private sector in iran during 1980-2007. at first, the uncertainty variables of real informal exchange rate, nominal interest rate and ...

ABSTRACT A model for deriving perceived local speech rate directly out of the speech signal is developed based on perception experiments. Since local speech rate modifies acoustic cues (e.g. transitions and voice-onset time [5]), phones [1, 4, 7, 19], syllables [3, 15], and even words, it is one of the most important prosodic cues. Our local speech rate estimation method is based on a linear co...

During conversation, spoken utterances occur in rich acoustic contexts, including speech produced by our interlocutor(s) and speech we produced ourselves. Prosodic characteristics of the acoustic context have been known to influence speech perception in a contrastive fashion: for instance, a vowel presented in a fast context is perceived to have a longer duration than the same vowel in a slow c...

This acoustic study investigates speech rhythmic restructurings due to speech rate increase in Brazilian Portuguese. Rhythmic restructuring is considered here as the reorganization of stress groups due to speech rate increase. The Dynamical Speech Rhythm model was used as a theoretical background for the acoustic analyses. Main results have shown that speech rate increase reorganizes speech rhy...

In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm to enhance the noisy speech in the framework of dual-channel speech enhancement. The new method is a hybrid optimization algorithm, which employs the  combination of  the  conventional θ-PSO and the shuffled sub-swarms particle optimization (SSPSO) technique. It is known that the θ-PSO algorithm has better optimization performance than standard PSO al...

The present research addressed the prosodic realization of global and local text structure and content in the spoken discourse data produced by Persian EFL learners. Two newspaper articles were analyzed using Rhetorical Structure Theory. Based on these analyses, the global structure in terms of hierarchical level, the local structure in terms of the relative importance of text segments and the ...