Given that state of the art speech synthesis systems have already reached a high naturalness level, it is time to move to talking speech from the actual read speech framework. For this purpose it is thus necessary to investigate how disfluencies can be included in speech synthesis and even increase its naturalness. This paper builds on a previously presented work and focuses on finding a local ...

Introduction During the first year, infants are highly attuned to suprasegmental aspects of speech. This sensitivity may be exploited in the infant’s segmentation of the speech stream into clausal units. Hirsh-Pasek, Kemler Nelson, Jusczyk, Wright Cassidy, Druss and Kennedy (1987) examined young infants’ sensitivity to the pauses and other suprasegmental cues that coincided with clausal boundar...

Hypopneas or pauses in respiratory effort frequently precede episodes of obstructive sleep apnea resulting in mixed apneas. We studied five subjects after chronic tracheostomy for obstructive sleep apnea. During stable non-REM (NREM) sleep, subjects breathed entirely through the tracheostomy. Tracheostomy occlusion caused experimental obstructive apnea which lasted 13.9 +/- 4.7 sec and ended wi...

The massive computational capacity of the cerebellar cortex is conveyed by Purkinje cells onto cerebellar and vestibular nuclei neurons through their GABAergic, inhibitory output. This implies that pauses in Purkinje cell simple spike activity are potentially instrumental in cerebellar information processing, but their occurrence and extent are still heavily debated. The cerebellar cortex, alth...

Fillers and pauses in spoken language indicate hesitations. Filler type (uh vs. um) is believed to signal a minor or major following speech delay in L1. We examined whether advanced speakers of L2 German use pauses following filler type (äh vs. ähm) in the same way as native speakers do. Two Map Task corpora of L1 and L2 were contrasted with respect to speaker role, filler type and the exact ti...

This paper examines and reports on how ”filled pauses” included when delivering speeches influence the understanding, and change the impression, of the speech as shown through the research and experiments we conducted on trial subjects. We conducted research about speeches and lectures given at classes at our university, and at academic meetings. A questionnaire related to filled pauses was giv...

For customer-facing Java applications (e.g., online gaming and online chatting), ensuring low latencies is not just a preferred feature, but a must-have feature. Given the popularity and powerfulness of Java, a significant portion of today's backend services are implemented in Java. JVM (Java Virtual Machine) manages a heap space to hold application objects. The heap space can be frequently GC-...

RNA polymerases are enzymes that transcribe genes from DNA onto strands of RNA. The transcription elongation by multisubunit RNA polymerases is processive but nonuniform: one enzyme can translocate along the DNA template for thousands of nucleotide addition steps but, sometimes, it can enter backtracking long pauses. Here, we present a Brownian ratchet model for the processive transcription elo...