Difficulty communicating in noise is a common complaint for people with hearing loss. When communicating in noise, speakers increase the intensity level of their voice and alter the stress patterns of their speech not only to monitor their own voice but also to be heard by others. Speech that increases in intensity for the purpose of self-monitoring and being understood in noise is called Lomba...

Neutral tone (T0) is a special tone form in Mandarin that contains tonal and stress information. Compared with canonical tones, T0 has a much shorter duration and reduced pitch contour. Its tonal contour is determined by the preceding canonical tone. However, not much is known about the perception of tonal and stress information in T0. In the current study, we investigate (1) whether T0 can be ...

Whispering is commonly used when one needs to speak softly (for instance, in a library). Whispered speech mainly differs from neutral speech in that voicing, and thus its acoustic correlate F0, is absent. It is well known that in tonal languages such as Mandarin, tone identity is primarily conveyed by the F0 contour. Previous works also suggest that secondary correlates are both consistent and ...

Research on text-to-speech (TTS) conversion for Mandarin Chinese is a much younger enterprise than comparable research for English or other European languages. Nonetheless, impressive progress has been made over the last couple of decades, and Mandarin Chinese systems now exist which approach, or in some ways even surpass in quality available systems for English. This article has two goals. The...

Languages function as independent and distinct conventional systems, and so each language uses different words to label the same objects. This study investigated whether 2-year-old children recognize that speakers of their native language and speakers of a foreign language do not share the same knowledge. Two groups of children unfamiliar with Mandarin were tested: monolingual English-learning ...

Satsuma mandarins (Citrus unshiu Marc.) are the predominant cultivated citrus variety in Japan. Clarification of its origin would prove valuable for citrus taxonomy and mandarin breeding programs; however, current information is limited. We applied genome-wide genotyping using a 384 citrus single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) array and MARCO computer software to investigate the satsuma mandarin...

Multiple accents are often present in spontaneous Chinese Mandarin speech as most Chinese have learned Mandarin as a second language. We propose a method to handle multiple accents as well as standard speech in a speaker-independent system by merging auxiliary accent decision trees with standard trees and reconstruct the acoustic model. In our proposed method, tree structures and shape are modi...

The purpose of this study was to examine whether speaker variability and noise affect native and non-native listeners differently in Mandarin tone perception. Multi-speaker tone stimuli embedded in speech-shaped noise were presented blocked by speaker or mixed across speakers. The listeners included 20 native listeners and 33 non-native listeners with various degree of Mandarin proficiency, def...

This paper presents the UPC TTS system named Ogmios. It was used to generate the voices in UK English and Mandarin Chinese for Blizzard Challenge 2008. Ogmios is a system based on unit-selection using acoustic and phonetic features both in target and concatenation costs. Most of the modules of Ogmios rely on data driven techniques. This evaluation confirms that this framework allows fast develo...