Orienting biases for speech may provide a foundation for language development. Although human infants show a bias for listening to speech from birth, the relation of a speech bias to later language development has not been established. Here, we examine whether infants' attention to speech directly predicts expressive vocabulary. Infants listened to speech or non-speech in a preferential listeni...

We consider how to construct summary indices (e.g., Quality of Life indices) for a social unit (e.g., cities, states, nations) that will be endorsed by a majority of its citizens. We assume that many social indicators are available to describe the social unit, but that individuals disagree about the relative weights to be assigned to each social indicator. The summary index that maximizes agree...

In this paper, we describe an n-gram approach to automatically assess essay quality in student writing. Underlying this approach is the development of n-gram indices that examine rhetorical, syntactic, grammatical, and cohesion features of paragraph types (introduction, body, and conclusion paragraphs) and entire essays. For this study, we developed over 300 n-gram indices and assessed their po...

Speech quality, as perceived by the users of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony, is critically important to the uptake of this service. VoIP quality can be degraded by network layer problems (delay, jitter, packet loss). This paper presents a method for real-time, non-intrusive speech quality estimation for VoIP that emulates the subjective listening quality measures based on Mean Op...

This paper investigates the performance of objective speech and audio quality measures for the prediction of perceived sound quality of synthetic speech. A number of existing quality measures have been applied to synthetic speech generated by different speech synthesizers such like LP synthesizer, HSM synthesizer, STRAIGHT synthesizer and several HMM based text-to-speech synthesis systems. The ...

Clustering attempts to discover significant groups present in a data set. It is an unsupervised process. It is difficult to define when a clustering result is acceptable. Thus, several clustering validity indices are developed to evaluate the quality of clustering algorithms results. In this paper, we propose to improve the quality of a clustering algorithm called ”CLUSTER” by using a validity ...

The quality of speech signal over a VoIP system is degraded by various network layer problems which include jamming, jitter, packet loss. Different types of noises also degrade the quality of speech signal such as external noise and quantization noise. This paper improves the quality of VoIP speech signal affected by these noises and network layer problems. The quality of degraded VoIP speech s...

introduction: stuttering is a communication disorder that, in addition to speech fluency, can affect all aspects of personal life. through numerous researches and also from the experiences of people who stutter (pws), it is now evident that stuttering can cause an over all sense of life dissatisfaction. the aim of this study was to compare the quality of life in adults with stuttering versus th...

This analysis applied systematic review as a methodology for identifying, analyzing and interpreting data on the use of water quality indices human consumption. Scientific articles were searched in “PubMed”, “Scielo”, “ScienceDirect” “Web Science" databases, using keywords “drinking water” “water index”, with custom interval between 2000 2020. The results indicated 82,573 published articles, 16...