We present the implementation and evaluation of an open-domain unit selection speech synthesis engine designed to be flexible enough to encourage further unit selection research and allow rapid voice development by users with minimal speech synthesis knowledge and experience. We address the issues of automatically processing speech data into a usable voice using automatic segmentation technique...

Although it is widely used in every day activities and in several professions such as locution, shorthand and stenography among others, the magnitude speed of the speech does not have a precise way of measurement. Such notion is fundamental in the context of the study of the typical behavior of a main set of language allophones as the basic components for a robust speech synthesis. No precise i...

English-speaking children have acquired phrasefinal lengthening by the age of 2, but other aspects of prosodic organization appear to be later acquired. This study investigated 2-year-olds’ prosodic organization of function words in an elicited imitation task. In particular, we wanted to know if children would prosodify pronouns 1) as part of a trochaic foot with the preceding word, or 2) as a ...

The department is engaged in European cooperation within the COST-projec t on speech synthesis and recognition, and has also been invited to the European Community project on Blindness and Technology. Together with the Swedish Telecom, we are engaged in the SAM project (Speech Assessment Methods) in the second phase of ESPRIT. The Swedish Teleeom is an important industrial contact for the depar...

In this paper we present a speech rate estimator based on so-called rhythmicity features derived from a modified version of the short-time energy envelope. To evaluate the new method, it is compared to a traditional speech rate estimator on the basis of semi-automatic segmentation. Speech material from the Alcohol Language Corpus (ALC) covering intoxicated and sober speech of different speech s...

In this paper, we investigate segmental prolongation in a corpus of spontaneous Japanese monologues consisting of over 700,000 words. We examine effects on the rate of prolongation of various factors including speech types, the genders of speakers, word classes, word positions in the phrase and in the inter-pausal unit, and the presence of preceding fillers. Based on the empirical findings, we ...

In this study we investigated how pause length and pause ratio influence listeners in ascribing emotional states to the speaker, if nothing but the length of the pauses changes. We did this by taking emotionally neutral speech samples and manipulating the length of pauses. Our results show that the same speech samples were perceived to be happier, more positive, more heated, and concurrently le...