In this study, we examine the acoustic structure of schwa variants in a speech corpus intended for concatenative TTS. Our goals are two-fold. First, as a matter of academic interest, we seek to characterize schwa acoustics in a speech corpus designed to provide broad coverage of diand tri-phone contexts. This characterization extends recent work on the distinction between the barred-i variant o...

Glottalization of coda /t, p/ is a common process in American English. This study uses acoustic measures to determine when coda glottalization occurs in the conversational speech of the Buckeye Corpus. Vowels preceding coda /t, p/ tokens for 40 speakers were analyzed using H1*–H2*, an acoustic correlate of glottal constriction. Results indicate that coda glottalization is more common before a s...

The development of an efficient compression scheme to process the Arabic language represents a difficult task. This paper employs the dynamic Huffman coding on data compression with variable length bit coding, on the Arabic language. Experimental tests have been performed on both Arabic and English text. A comparison is made to measure the efficiency of compressing data results on both Arabic a...

American English and Taiwan English have been found to exhibit different rhythmic patterns. American English is often described as a stress-timed language, while it has been suggested that Taiwan English is a syllable-timed language. This paper addresses the differences between these two varieties of English through an acoustic study. In particular the F1/F2 formant space is investigated. The r...

AbstractThe last thirty five years have created a challenging situation for Iran and its people: on the one hand, the discriminatory British and American policies towards the country have given rise to considerable bitterness; on the other, we continue to teach both British and American English. If Iranian people wish to play a more active role internationally, it is time to review our English ...

In 2011, NIST held the most recent in an ongoing series of Language Recognition Evaluations originating in 1996. The 2011 NIST Language Recognition Evaluation (LRE11) featured 24 languages, including nine languages new to the LRE series, from two different source types, and had participation from 23 research organizations. LRE11 utilized a new evaluation metric, which focused on difficult to di...

introduction: the aim of the present study was to compare hand stainless steel k-files and nickel-titanium profile 0.04 taper 29 series rotary instruments for their efficiency, procedural errors and time consumed in preparation of root canal system. materials and methods: a total of 46 maxillary and mandibular first premolars extracted for orthodontic purposes were collected (two contralateral ...

The cultural background in language teaching has, for a number of reasons, recently moved to the foreground. Broadly speaking, there has been a shift in emphasis in course design from a pre-occupation with form to an interest in content. This article describes the results of a survey designed to elicit the views of students on what language teaching should be about. 400 students learning Englis...

BACKGROUND The Individual Work Performance Questionnaire (IWPQ), measuring task performance, contextual performance, and counterproductive work behavior, was developed in The Netherlands. OBJECTIVES To cross-culturally adapt the IWPQ from the Dutch to the American-English language, and assess the questionnaire's internal consistency and content validity in the American-English context. METH...