The present study uses the envelope modulation spectrum (EMS) measure to assess the effect of language, speaking style, and age on rhythm. Three experiments using a weighted mean of the EMS called the spectral centroid were conducted. The first examined rhythm in English and Croatian across conversational and clear speaking styles. The second experiment compared rhythmic characteristics of mono...

The design of robust new interfaces that process conversational speech is a challenging research direction largely because users’ spoken language is so variable, which is especially true of children. The present research explored whether children’s response latencies before initiating a conversational turn converge with those heard in the text-to-speech (TTS) of a computer partner. A study was ...

Goal-orientated Conversational Agents are a specific family of conversational agents that are designed to converse with humans through the use of natural language dialogue to achieve a specific task. Traditionally, they utilise pattern matching algorithms to capture the values of specific attributes through their values through dialogue interaction with a user. This is achieved through the use ...

This paper presents a corpus study that investigates the question of word order variations (WOV) in spontaneous spoken French and its consequences on the parsing techniques that are used in Natural Language Processing. We have studied four taskoriented spoken dialogue corpora which concern different application tasks (air transport or tourism information, switchboard calls). Two corpora concern...

Based on anticipatory looking and reactions to violations of expected events, infants have been credited with 'theory of mind' (ToM) knowledge that a person's search behaviour for an object will be guided by true or false beliefs about the object's location. However, little is known about the preconditions for looking patterns consistent with belief attribution in infants. In this study, we com...

As spoken language systems become more conversational in nature, new interfaces are emerging with animated characters that are designed to elicit and manage a conversation with the user. In the present study, the spoken language of ten 6-to-10year-old children was compared while interacting with an animated character in the I SEE! interface and again while interacting with a human adult. Analys...

In recent years, the interest in research in speech understanding and spoken interaction has soared due to the emergence of virtual personal assistants. However, whilst the ability of these agents to recognise conversational speech is maturing rapidly, their ability to understand and interact is still limited. At the same time we have witnessed the development of the number of models based on m...

We present a database of code-switched conversational human– machine dialog in English–Hindi and English–Spanish. We leveraged HALEF, an open-source standards-compliant cloudbased dialog system to capture audio and video of bilingual crowd workers as they interacted with the system. We designed conversational items with intra-sentential code-switched machine prompts, and examine its efficacy in...

Lack of data is a problem in training language models for conversational speech recognition, particularly for languages other than English. Experiments in English have successfully used webbased text collection targeted for a conversational style to augment small sets of transcribed speech; here we look at extending these techniques to Mandarin. In addition, we investigate different techniques ...