Text to speech (TTS) systems hold promise as an information access tool for literate and illiterate including visually challenged. Current TTS systems can convert a typical text into a natural sounding speech. However, auditory rendering of mathematical content, specifically equation reading is not a trivial task. Mathematical equations have to be read so that appropriate bracketing such as par...

This paper describes Brno University of Technology (BUT) system for the Interspeech 2010 Paralinguistic Challenge. Our submitted systems for the Ageand Gender-Sub-Challenges employ fusions of several sub-systems. We make use of our own acoustic frame-based feature sets, as well as the provided utterance-based acoustic, prosodic and voice quality features. Modeling is based on Gaussian Mixture M...

This paper aims to verify the efficacy of Cognitive Pragmatic Treatment (CPT), a new remediation training for the improvement of the communicative-pragmatic abilities, in patients with schizophrenia. The CPT program is made up of 20 group sessions, focused on a number of communication modalities, i.e., linguistic, extralinguistic and paralinguistic, theory of mind (ToM) and other cognitive func...

Emotions can be recognized by audible paralinguistic cues in speech. By detecting these paralinguistic cues that can consist of laughter, a trembling voice, coughs, changes in the intonation contour etc., information about the speaker’s state and emotion can be revealed. This paper describes the development of a gender-independent laugh detector with the aim to enable automatic emotion recognit...

In addition to linguistically coded information, speech conveys necessarily also some paralinguistic information of expressive (affective and adaptive), organic and perspectival kind, but all respective features lack invariant absolute acoustic correlates. According to the Modulation Theory, a speaker’s voice functions as a carrier that is modulated by speech gestures. Listeners have to demodul...

In this article the I3Media corpus is presented, a trilingual (Catalan, English, Spanish) speech database of neutral and emotional material collected for analysis and synthesis purposes. The corpus is actually made up of six different subsets of material: a neutral subcorpus, containing emotionless utterances; a ‘dialog’ subcorpus, containing typical call center utterances; an ‘emotional’ corpu...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to analyze the effects of culture on the creative and stylistic features children employ when producing narratives based on wordless picture books. METHOD Participants included 60 first- and second-grade African American, Latino American, and Caucasian children. A subset of narratives based on wordless picture books collected as part of a larger study was...

The present paper focuses on the questions of modern advertising science, structure of advertising and elements making actual manipulative influence from the addresser. Advertising encourages product sales, is an instrument of forming ethical standards, values, creating cultural values, standards and mode of behavior that is why the wide system of means for achieving aims of advertisers is need...