This paper introduces the LetsRead Corpus of European Portuguese read speech from 6 to 10 years old children. The motivation for the creation of this corpus stems from the inexistence of databases with recordings of reading tasks of Portuguese children with different performance levels and including all the common reading aloud disfluencies. It is also essential to develop techniques to fulfill...

Systems driven out of equilibrium can often exhibit behaviour not seen in systems in thermal equilibriumfor example phase transitions in one-dimensional systems. In this talk I will review several ‘condensation’ transitions that occur when a conserved quantity is driven through the system. Although the condensation is spatial, i.e. a finite fraction of the conserved quantity condenses into a sm...

Policy problems like “What should we do about global warming?” are ill-defined in large part because we do not agree on a system to represent them the way we agree Algebra problems should be represented by equations. As a first step toward building a policy deliberation tutor, we investigated: (a) whether causal diagrams help students learn to evaluate policy options, (b) whether constructing d...

Britain's new government is thinking aloud about radical changes to university funding and other countries are also considering the future.

We present a simple tool that enables the computer to read subtitles of movies and TV shows aloud. The tool extracts information from subtitle files, which can be freely downloaded or extracted from a DVD, and reads the text aloud through a speech synthesizer. The target audience is people who have trouble reading subtitles while watching a movie, for example people with visual impairments and ...

The paper reports a comparative assessment of 3 usability-testing methods (UTM) involving 45 children aged 8-14 as test-users. The 3 methods were concurrent think-aloud, interview and questionnaire. These 3 UTM ’s require different levels of verbalisation from the children that were performing the evaluation. It was hypothesised that the age of the children, their gender, verbal competence and ...

The study concerns how prosody, including pauses, is used to give extra weight to focused words when repeated with successively more emphasis. The analysis is based on the same three-word phrase produced in two different communicative contexts, one a dialogue interaction and one a reading-aloud situation. Results show greater adjustments in the dialogue context. When emphasis was increased, the...

The detection of indoor landmarks remains a troublesome endeavour. The rise of more performant and user-friendly mobile eye tracking devices might offer a solution. A small-scale study was conducted in which a test population was given a navigational task and whereby eye movement measures and think aloud protocols were compared. The first results indicate that eye tracking has high potential fo...

This paper deals with a prosodic comparison of spontaneous and read-aloud speech. More speci cally, the study reports data on F0 declination in these two speaking modes using Swedish materials. For both speaking styles the analysis revealed negative slopes, a steepness-duration dependency with declination being less steep in longer utterances than in shorter ones and resetting at utterance boun...

The aim of this study was to examine the effect of vowelization on reading Arabic orthography. Native children speakers of Arabic were asked to read aloud words (vowelized and unvowelized) and pseudowords. The results showed that unvowelized words were read aloud more quickly and more accurately than the shallow fully vowelized Arabic words. The disadvantage of vowelized words in both speed and...