The aim of our study was to investigate whether children distinguish between ‘new’ and ‘given’ information via phonetic reduction in spontaneous speech in a similar way to adults. An interactive ‘spot the difference’ game was used to elicit spontaneous speech. Word duration, fundamental frequency and vowel formant frequencies in repeated content words relative to when they were mentioned for th...

Speech animation synthesis is still a challenging topic in the field of computer graphics. Despite many challenges, representing detailed appearance of inner mouth such as nipping tongue’s tip with teeth and tongue’s back hasn’t been achieved in the resulting animation. To solve this problem, we propose a method of data-driven speech animation synthesis especially when focusing on the inside of...

A novel constrained texture synthesis approach is proposed to enhance the visual quality of a degraded image by reconstructing its high frequency texture content. In low-bit-rate image and video compression and communication systems, high frequency transformed coefficients are often lost due to aggressive quantization or un-even error protection schemes. However, with the block-based encoding a...

We present an initial study on how to model smiled speech with an articulatory speech synthesizer, led by the research question as to what cues are responsible for the effect of an audible distinction of smiled vs. non-smiled speech. In a perception test, we explore the relative contributions of i) spreading of the lips, ii) raising of the larynx, and iii) raising of the fundamental frequency. ...

This paper describes CU VOCAL, a Chinese text-to-speech synthesis system that adopts the approach of corpus-based syllable concatenation. We have demonstrated the applicability of the approach primarily for Cantonese, a major dialect of Chinese predominant in Hong Kong, South China and many overseas Chinese communities. This work extends our previous work as described in [1]. Our approach is ab...

In Japanese conversations, rise-fall intonation with vowel lengthening often occurs on the final syllable of a phrase. This phrase-final rise-fall (PFRF) is a new type of intonation first reported in the 1960’s. Researchers consider PFRF intonation a discourse marker which functions to sharpen the phrase boundary and retain the utterance turn, but other phrase-final intonation such as phrase-fi...

Solid-phase chemistry, photolabile protecting groups, and photolithography have been combined to achieve light-directed, spatially addressable parallel chemical synthesis to yield a highly diverse set of chemical products. Binary masking, one of many possible combinatorial synthesis strategies, yields 2n compounds in n chemical steps. An array of 1024 peptides was synthesized in ten steps, and ...

In this paper, a high-quality concatenative synthesis system using the deterministic plus stochastic model of speech is described, in which the prosodic modifications are performed by means of very simple and efficient operations, as we reported in a previous work [11]. In particular, pitchsynchrony is not necessary, and linear interpolations substitute other types of estimation. The method for...

This study presents a new auditory-based distance measure with application to concatenative speech synthesis. This measure employs the Carney auditory model to produce a feature vector related to auditory perception. For concatenative synthesis, the new measure is employed to assess perceived discontinuities at segment transitions. Evaluations using a restricted data base environment show that ...

This paper presents the program synthesis system IOSS (Integrated Open Synthesis System). It is based on the concept of strategy as a uniform representation of development knowledge making the integration of diierent synthesis methods possible. The implemented system is an instantiation of a generic system architecture designed to provide machine support for the application of formal methods in...