Among deaf individuals fitted with a cochlear implant, some use Cued Speech (CS; a system in which each syllable is uttered with a complementary manual gesture) and therefore, have to combine auditory, labial and manual information to perceive speech. We examined how audio-visual (AV) speech integration is affected by the presence of manual cues and on which form of information (auditory, labia...

Two experiments examined the hypothesis that developing visual attentional mechanisms influence infants' Visual Short-Term Memory (VSTM) in the context of multiple items. Five- and 10-month-old infants (N = 76) received a change detection task in which arrays of three differently colored squares appeared and disappeared. On each trial one square changed color and one square was cued; sometimes ...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the neural correlates of hypophonia in individuals with idiopathic PD (IPD) before and after voice treatment with the Lee Silverman Voice Treatment method (VT) using (15)O-H(2)O PET. METHODS Regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) changes associated with overt speech-motor tasks relative to the resting state were measured in the IPD subjects before and after VT, and in a ...

Binaural hearing in cochlear implant (CI) users can be achieved either by bilateral implantation or bimodally with a contralateral hearing aid (HA). Binaural-bimodal hearing has the advantage of complementing the high-frequency electric information from the CI by low-frequency acoustic information from the HA. We examined the contribution of a contralateral HA in 25 adult implantees to their pe...

Digital archives have emerged as the pre-eminent method for capturing the human experience. Before such archives can be used efficiently, their contents must be described. The scale of such archives along with the associated content mark up cost make it impractical to provide access via purely manual means, but automatic technologies for search in spoken materials still have relatively limited ...

Vowel length contrasts in Japanese, e.g., chizu “map” vs. chiizu “cheese”, are cued primarily by vowel duration. However, since short and long vowel durations overlap considerably in ordinary speech, learning to perceive vowel length contrasts is complex. Meanwhile, infant-directed speech (IDS) is known to “exaggerate” certain properties of adult-directed speech (ADS). If so, then it is possibl...

Recently there has been increased interest in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Key Word Spotting (KWS) systems for low resource languages. One of the driving forces for this research direction is the IARPA Babel project. This paper describes some of the research funded by this project at Cambridge University, as part of the Lorelei team co-ordinated by IBM. A range of topics are discussed...

We have implemented a complete text-to-speech synthesis system by concatenation that addresses French Manual Cued Speech (FMCS). It uses two separate dictionaries, one for multimodal diphones with audio and facial articulation, and the other with the gestures between two consecutive FMCS keys (“dikeys”). Dictionaries were built from real data. This paper presents our methodology and the final r...