Summay.-The focus of this cross-sectional study was the investigation of Speech Naturalness (speech that sounds normal or natural to the listener) of 60 normal speaking children and adolescents between the ages of 8 and 16 years. 26 naive adult listeners rated the naturalness of videotaped and computer-presented speech samples, using a 9-point-Likert rating scale (1: highly natural sounding spe...

Obtaining natural synthesized speech is the main goal of modern research in the field of speech synthesis. It strongly depends on the prosody model used in the text-to-speech (TTS) system. This paper deals with speech synthesis evaluation with respect to the prosodic model used. Our Russian VitalVoice TTS is a unit selection concatenative system. We describe two approaches to prosody prediction...

In this paper we analyse the effect of speech corpus and compression method on the intelligibility of synthesized speech at fast rates. We recorded English and German language voice talents at a normal and a fast speaking rate and trained an HSMMbased synthesis system based on the normal and the fast data of each speaker. We compared three compression methods: scaling the variance of the state ...

Listeners are able to rate a speaker’s age with reasonable accuracy. However, it is still controversial which features reliably signal a speaker’s age. This paper presents results of a synthesis study, where speech rate, pitch, and a glottal chink were varied systematically over a range that effectively occurs in natural speech to shift the mean perceived age. The strongest impact on age judgem...

This paper describes the pilot study of phonetic segmentation applied to Nijmegen Corpus of Casual Czech (NCCCz). This corpus contains informal speech of strong spontaneous nature which influences the character of produced speech at various levels. This work is the part of wider research related to the analysis of pronunciation reduction in such informal speech. We present the analysis of the a...

Infants and adults are well able to match auditory and visual speech, but the cues on which they rely (viz. temporal, phonetic and energetic correspondence in the auditory and visual speech streams) may differ. Here we assessed the relative contribution of the different cues using sine-wave speech (SWS). Adults (N=52) and infants (N=34, age ranged in between 5 and 15months) matched 2 trisyllabi...

In this study artificial neural nets (ANN), relating articulation to acoustic features, are used as tools to investigate the ability of different vocal-tract models to describe the vocal tract. The vocal tract models are compared by means of a test material common to all evaluations. Different ANN configurations are used and investigated. Aspects of analysing natural speech signal with ANNs, tr...

The Role of the Syllable in Speech Segmentation In previous papers we proposed that the syllable is a natural unit in speech processing (Mehler, Segui, and Frauenfelder 1981; Mehler 1981; Segui 1984). According to this position, syllabic units are constructed from the continuous speech signal and constitute the input for lexical access and eventually for more detailed phonemic analysis. This hy...

The goal of this research is to develop a spoken language system that will demonstrate the usefulness of voice input for interactive problem solving. The system will accept continuous speech, and will handle multiple speakers without explicit speaker enrollment. Combining speech recognition and natural language processing to achieve speech understanding, the system will be demonstrated in an ap...

Text-to-Prosody systems based on the use of prosodic databases extracted from natural speech will be a key point for further development of new Text-to-Speech systems. This paper describes a system using such speech databases to generate the rhythm and the intonation of a French written text. The system is based on a very crude chinks ’n chunks prosodic phrasing algorithm and on a prosodic anal...