In this study we investigated the durational correlates of lexical stress and pitch accent at normal and fast speech rate in Dutch. Previous literature on English shows that durations of lexically unstressed vowels are reduced more than stressed vowels when speakers increase their speech rate. We found that the same holds for Dutch, irrespective of whether the unstressed vowel is schwa or a 慺ul...

We are developing two-dimensional 16 × 25 pixel detector arrays of both unstressed and stressed Ge:Ga photoconduc-tive detectors for far-infrared astronomy from SOFIA. The arrays, based on earlier 5 × 5 detector arrays used on the KAO, will be for our new instrument, the Far Infrared Field Imaging Line Spectrometer (FIFI LS). The unstressed Ge:Ga detector array will cover the wavelength range f...

In this paper we develop a new constitutive law for the description of the (passive) mechanical response of arterial tissue. The artery is modeled as a thick-walled nonlinearly elastic circular cylindrical tube consisting of two layers corresponding to the media and adventitia (the solid mechanically relevant layers in healthy tissue). Each layer is treated as a fiber-reinforced material with t...

Right ventricular loading leads to diastolic septal flattening in man without necessarily requiring right ventricular pressure to exceed left ventricular pressure. This observation suggested that the unstressed septal configuration is flat and that its normal concave shape is due to the left-to-right transseptal pressure gradient. To examine this hypothesis, we studied septal configuration by t...

One of the goals of phonetic investigations is to find strategies for vowel production independent of speaker-specific vocal-tract anatomies and individual biomechanic properties. In this paper we apply a technique for speaker normalization to formant spaces, lingual vowel target positions and palate midlines. The general goal is to extract speaker-independent strategies for stress production i...

This is a summary view of temporal patters we have observed in the analysis of Swedish text reading. Special attention is devoted to trends of quanta1 structures in the timing of vowels and consonants, syllables, interstress intervals and pauses. It is well known that pause durations increase with increasing syntactic order of boundaries. A recent study supports our previous findings of multipl...

typically, two configurations are used for energy harvesting, with different advantages: piezoelastic and piezomagnetoelastic. best performance of piezoelastic configuration is limited to its narrow bandwidth around the resonance frequency. if the excitation frequency slightly deviates from the resonance frequency, the power-out is severely reduced. to overcome this, the piezomagnetoelastic has...

Stress plays a crucial role in the understanding of speech by human listeners. However, automatic speech recognition results deteriorate in the presence of stress due to the change it causes in the speech parameters. Meanwhile, due to the vast diversity of the presence of stress in speech, a speech corpus that contains the majority of different stress conditions is difficult to obtain in real w...