The generation of synthetic speech with a certain degree of expressiveness has been successful for some particular applications or speaking styles (e.g. emotions). In this context, there is a particular speaking style with subtle speech nuances that may be of great interest for delivering expressive speech: the storytelling style. The purpose of this paper is to define a first step towards deve...

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with continuous arterial spin labeling (CASL) was employed to monitor brain activation during narrative production of a semi-structured speech sample in healthy young adults. Subjects were asked to describe a wordless children's picture story. Significant activations were found in bilateral prefrontal and left temporal-parietal regions during narrati...

Individuals share experiences and build relationships through the medium of narrative. Lifelong personal narratives play a key role in developing social identity. Individuals with little or no functional speech due to severe speech and physical impairments (SSPI) find it difficult to share personal narrative as augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems do not support interactive ...

Narrative skill in kindergarteners has been shown to be a reliable predictor of later reading comprehension and school achievement. However, we know little about how to scaffold children's narrative skill. Here we examine whether the quality of kindergarten children's narrative retellings depends on the kind of narrative elicitation they are given. We asked this question with respect to typical...

Whilst techniques for narrative generation and agent behaviour have made significant progress in recent years, natural language processing remains a bottleneck hampering the scalability of Interactive Storytelling systems. This demonstrator introduces a novel interaction technique based solely on emotional speech recognition. It allows the user to use speech to interact with virtual actors with...

Whilst techniques for narrative generation and agent behaviour have made significant progress in recent years, natural language processing remains a bottleneck hampering the scalability of Interactive Storytelling systems. This demonstrator introduces a novel interaction technique based solely on emotional speech recognition. It allows the user to use speech to interact with virtual actors with...

Speakers of all ages spontaneously gesture as they talk. These gestures predict children's milestones in vocabulary and sentence structure. We ask whether gesture serves a similar role in the development of narrative skill. Children were asked to retell a story conveyed in a wordless cartoon at age five and then again at six, seven, and eight. Children's narrative structure in speech improved a...

Children struggle with the interpretation of pronouns in direct speech (Ann said, "I get a cookie"), but not in indirect speech (Ann said that she gets a cookie) (Köder & Maier, 2016). Yet children's books consistently favor direct over indirect speech (Baker & Freebody, 1989). To reconcile these seemingly contradictory findings, we hypothesize that the poor performance found by Köder and Maier...

The widely shocking attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11 was interpreted differently by various institutions worldwide, ranging from America's legitimate motive to begin a 'war on terror' to defend her 'very freedom', to a pretext for Bush administration to pursue G. H. W. Bush's temptation for 'a new world order'. Various institutions, therefore, made use of their...

Despite the substantial literature on reported speech, its treatment in structural and quantitative-distributional analyses of discourse has remained problematic. This article surveys and discusses a range of methodological issues created by the occurrence of embedded segments of direct reported speech in narrative discourse. Analysis of a personal experience narrative from the Australian langu...