Toshiba English Text-to-Speech Synthesizer utilizes several new techniques to produce synthesized speech that is more natural-sounding and intelligible than that created by conventional synthesizers. The closed-loop training method creates synthesis units that most closely resemble the training data and are the least susceptible to prosodic distortion noise by analytically solving an equation t...

Literature is replete with the studies focusing on the role of vocabulary knowledge in second language receptive skills. However, the relationship between the aspects of vocabulary knowledge and productive skills in general, and the speaking performance in particular has remained scanty in the related literature. This paper examined the relationship between knowledge of L2 vocabulary size at di...

This paper deals with the impact of the salience of complex words and their constituent parts on lexical access. While almost 40 years of psycholinguistic studies have focused on the relevance of morphological structure for word recognition, little attention has been devoted to the relationship between the word as a whole unit and its constituent morphemes. Depending on the theoretical approach...

Similarly to simple words, compounds and other multi-word units (MWUs) are subject to inflection. A correct and exhaustive treatment of this issue has an important impact on natural language applications. However it raises some nontrivial questions such as: the role of separators in MWUs, morphological non-compositionality of MWUs, their syntactic and semantic variation, huge sizes of inflectio...

In this paper, we address the lexicon design problem in Turkish large vocabulary speech recognition. Although we focus only on Turkish, the methods described here are general enough that they can be considered for other agglutinative languages like Finnish, Korean etc. In an agglutinative language, several words can be created from a single root word using a rich collection of morphological rul...

Our main research focus this year was on the use of phrases (or multi-word units) in query expansion. Multi-word units (MWUs) comprise a number of lexical units, such as named entities (“United Nations”), nominal compounds (“amusement park”) and phrasal verbs (‘check in’). Although MWUs can belong to different parts of speech, our focus was on nominal MWUs. We used a combined syntactico-statist...

(2004). Effets de la fréquence du voisinage syllabique dans la reconnaissance des mot écrits et la lecture: Comparisons inter-tâches [Effects of syllable neighborhood frequency in visual word recognition and reading: Cross-task comparisons]. During the process of visual word recognition readers do not identify words as a whole –specially long words–, but rather there are sublexical units that m...

Sound units play a pivotal role in cognitive models of auditory comprehension. The general consensus is that during perception listeners break down speech into auditory words and subsequently phones. Indeed, cognitive speech recognition is typically taken to be computationally intractable without phones. Here we present a computational model trained on 20 hours of conversational speech that rec...

Current models of word recognition generally assume that word units orthographically similar to a stimulus word are involved in the visual recognition of this word. We refer to this set of orthographically similar words as an orthographic neighborhood. Two experiments are presented that investigate the ways in which the composition of this neighborhood can affect word recognition. The data indi...

A method for learning lexical representations of unknown words in an unsupervised manner is described. The unknown words are automatically extracted from continuous speech and a clustering algorithm is used to derive word clusters and lexical representations based on the set of phonetic units used in the system. In experiments, we verify the robustness of the approach. An interesting feature is...