UNLABELLED Speech production involves the integration of auditory, somatosensory, and motor information in the brain. This article describes a model of speech motor control in which a feedforward control system, involving premotor and primary motor cortex and the cerebellum, works in concert with auditory and somatosensory feedback control systems that involve both sensory and motor cortical ar...

A significant performance reduction is often observed in speech recognition when the rate of speech (ROS) is too low or too high. Most of present approaches to addressing the ROS variation focus on the change of speech signals in dynamic properties caused by ROS, and accordingly modify the dynamic model, e.g., the transition probabilities of the hidden Markov model (HMM). However, an abnormal R...

....................................................................................... .... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................... iv LIST OF FIGURES .................................................................................... viii CHAPTER 1. GENERAL INTRODUCTION ....................................................... . 1 Speech ...

Neuroimaging studies suggest that the cerebellum might play a role in both speech perception and speech perceptual learning. However, it remains unclear what this role is: does the cerebellum help shape the perceptual decision, or does it contribute to the timing of perceptual decisions? To test this, we used transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) in combination with a speech perception...

The aim of the article is to examine the Academic Model United Nations (Model UN) as a context-based integrative educational technique in profession-oriented foreign language teaching (FLT); to point out the context-based integrative nature of profession-oriented language learning and highlight the importance of using product-based educational techniques in FLT for developing students’ future p...

Laryngectomee patients lose their ability to produce speech sounds and suffer in their daily communication. There are currently limited communication options for these patients. Silent speech interfaces (SSIs), which recognize speech from articulatory information (i.e., without using audio information), have potential to assist the oral communication of persons with laryngectomy or other speech...

This paper presents a study on using confidence measures for unsupervised N-Best based adaptation of hidden Markov model (HMM) parameters. Confidence measures have been widely used for the detection of speech recognition errors. They are also useful in selecting and/or screening data for unsupervised adaptation of HMM. In this paper, a model-level confidence measure is proposed for model adapta...

Learning non-native speech categories is often considered a challenging task in adulthood. This difficulty is driven by cross-language differences in weighting critical auditory dimensions that differentiate speech categories. For example, previous studies have shown that differentiating Mandarin tonal categories requires attending to dimensions related to pitch height and direction. Relative t...

This paper describes the continued development of a system to provide early assessment of speech development issues in children and better triaging to professional services. Whilst corpora of children’s speech are increasingly available, recognition of disordered children’s speech is still a data-scarce task. Transfer learning methods have been shown to be effective at leveraging out-of-domain ...

Previous studies suggest fundamental differences between the perceptual learning of speech and non-speech stimuli. One major difference is in the way variability in the training set affects learning and its generalization to untrained stimuli: training-set variability appears to facilitate speech learning, while slowing or altogether extinguishing non-speech auditory learning. We asked whether ...