In this paper, the syllable, an alternative phonetic unit to the phone, is researched in the context of speech synthesis. Several approaches to syllable modelling within the statistical approach (using hidden Markov models) to the acoustic unit inventory creation are proposed and evaluated. To be able to synthesize an arbitrary text, the syllable inventories were supplemented with triphones res...

BACKGROUND Pathological Internet Use (PIU) has become a global issue associated with the increasing number of Internet users. Previous studies concerned both the interpersonal and intrapersonal vulnerable factors and the corresponding models. However, a limited amount of research has explored the relationship between positive factors and PIU. OBJECTIVE The current investigation attempted to c...

Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) were collected from 669 British children aged between 1;0 and 2;1. Comprehension and production scores in each age group are calculated. This provides norming data for the British infant population. The influence of socioeconomic group on vocabulary scores is considered and shown not to have a significant effect. The data from British infants is comp...

The mothers of 29 Spanish English bilingual 25-month-olds kept diary records of their children's dual language exposure and provided information on their children's English and Spanish language development using the MacArthur-Bates inventories. Relative amount of exposure predicted language outcomes in English and Spanish. In addition, the number of different speakers from whom the children hea...

This paper studies the within model-year pricing and production of new automobiles. Using new monthly data on U.S. transaction prices we document that for the typical new vehicle, the retail price (net of rebates and financing incentives) falls 9.4 percent over the 17-month model year. Concurrently, both sales and inventories are hump-shaped. To explain these time-series, we formulate a market ...