This paper introduces a new publicly-available Korean diphone database for speech synthesis and reports on our latest work towards a model of Korean prosody. The diphone database is compatible with the MBROLA programme of high-quality multilingual speech synthesis systems. The first part of the paper describes the phonetic and phonological structure of the database and describes how it was reco...

From a structural perspective, there are ten basic parts of the vertebrate CNS that are almost universally agreed upon. These parts have been grouped in at least five different ways corresponding to five different theories about its basic plan or architecture. Two classical models that remain popular today are derived from (1) comparative anatomy and the body's segmental organization, and (2) c...

For most of us, speaking in a non-native language involves deviating to some extent from native pronunciation norms. However, the detailed basis for foreign accent (FA) remains elusive, in part due to methodological challenges in isolating segmental from suprasegmental factors. The current study examines the role of segmental features in conveying FA through the use of a generative approach in ...

Two proficient tracheoesophageal speakers experienced in use of the tracheostoma valve (TSV) produced a total of 64 examples of "Bev loves Bob." These productions varied with location of contrastive stress, type of sentence intonation, and use of TSV. Thirty-four listeners judged the utterances in terms of stress placement and intonation contour simultaneously. An analysis of variance of the pe...

Current approaches to statistical parametric speech synthesis using Neural Networks generally require input at the same temporal resolution as the output, typically a frame every 5ms, or in some cases at waveform sampling rate. It is therefore necessary to fabricate highly-redundant frame-level (or samplelevel) linguistic features at the input. This paper proposes the use of a hierarchical enco...

Language-specific differences in the size and distribution of the phonemic repertoire can have implications for the task facing listeners in recognising spoken words. A language with more phonemes will allow shorter words and reduced embedding of short words within longer ones, decreasing the potential for spurious lexical competitors to be activated by speech signals. We demonstrate that this ...

In this paper we address the issue of whether modality can be coded by cues other than pitch accent category in Neapolitan Italian. Specifically, our findings show that segmentally identical sentences uttered as either a yes/no question or a statement show different patterns of local speech rate. Specifically, while global utterance duration is the same in the two modalities, differences were f...

The general objective of this study is to clear up the relative importance of prosody in the identification of a foreign accent. The methodology we propose, based on the prosody transplantation paradigm, can be applied to different languages or language varieties. Here, it is applied to Magrhrebian-accented French: we wanted to study what is perceived when the segmental and suprasegmental chara...