conclusions lower estimations in the nsu method might be due to the transmission barrier, which means that students were not fully aware of the high-risk behaviors of their close friends. nonetheless, it seems that these risky behaviors were more or less common among iranian college students. results the estimated prevalence using the cm and nsu were alcohol consumption (16.8% vs. 8.1%), opium ...

genetic parameters were estimated in a base and closed population of iranian honeybee colonies. data were obtained on 500-700 iranian native population of honey­bee colonies (honeybee breeding project in central region of iran) subject to 9 successive generation of selection. these populations had been selected for honey production, swarming behavior, and defense behavior. heritability of honey...

This study investigated the role of phrase-level prosodic boundary information in word segmentation in Korean with two word-spotting experiments. In experiment 1, it was found that intonational cues alone helped listeners with lexical segmentation. Listeners paid more attention to local intonational cues (...H#L...) across the prosodic boundary than the intonational information within a prosodi...

This paper presents a fully automated linguistic approach to measuring distance between phonemes across languages. In this approach, a phoneme is represented by a feature matrix where feature categories are fixed, hierarchically related and binary-valued; feature categorization explicitly addresses allophonic variation and feature values are weighted based on their relative prominence derived f...

Finding words in sentences is made difficult by the absence of obvious acoustic markers at word boundaries, such as silent pauses. Adult speakers of a language are often assumed to rely heavily on direct identification of known lexical items (e.g. McClelland & Elman, 1986). This strategy is however not available to infants who have to first learn the lexicon of their language. Several types of ...

This study presents longitudinal acoustic evidence of how an adult speaker’s vowels change across his lifespan. Noam Chomsky was chosen as a speaker because he presents an excellent opportunity to study the effect of relocation to a different dialect area on adult phonology since he was born and raised in Philadelphia and moved to Boston in 1955. Two linguistic variables that have different pho...

Concatenative synthesis can produce high-quality speech but is limited to the allophonic variations and voice types that were captured in the database. It would be desirable to modify speech units to remove formant discontinuities and to create new speaking styles, such as hypoor hyper-articulated speech. Unfortunately, manipulating the spectral structure often leads to degraded speech quality....

In Canadian French, besides periodic phonation, other cues can be associated with the voiced-voiceless distinction due to the application of phonological rules. These cues, mainly duration and vowel quality, may be present in the consonant itself (voiced consonants are shorter than their voiceless counterparts) and in the preceding vowels (duration and vowel quality). The cues are related to th...

In the context of large vocabulary speech recognition systems, it is crucial to accurately model the allophonic variations that will be found in a real world task. In this paper we describe a study on the use of data driven pronunciation variations, considering the generation and reduction strategies, as well as their impact in the system performance. The described techniques are supported by t...

Does prosody help word recognition? In this paper, we propose a novel probabilistic framework in which word and phoneme are dependent on prosody in a way that improves word recognition. We describe the idea of prosody dependent speech recognition by building a prosody dependent speech recognizer that conditions word and phoneme models on two important prosodic variables: intonational phrase bou...