In this paper, we investigate the effect of using a novel cost, RMS (Root Mean Square) cost, for segment selection for concatenative Text-to-Speech. The RMS cost is affected not only by the total degradation of naturalness but also by the local degradation of naturalness. From the results of experiments comparing this approach with segment selection based on a conventional average cost, it is f...

Media naturalness theory and social information processing theory make competing predictions regarding the effectiveness of different modes of communication at creating and maintaining emotionally intense social relationships. We explored how the duration of interaction and the form of laughter influenced happiness in communication modes with different levels of media naturalness. Forty-one par...

This Study investigates how different prosodic features affect native speakers' perception of L2 English spoken by Chinese students through dubbing, or re-voicing practice on video clips. Learning oral foreign language through dubbing on movie or animation clips has become very popular in China. In this practice, learners try to reproduce utterances as closely as possible to the original speech...

An electrolarynx is a device that artificially generates excitation sounds to produce electrolaryngeal (EL) speech. Although proficient laryngectomees can produce intelligible EL speech by using this device, it sounds quite unnatural due to the mechanical excitation. To address this issue, we have proposed several EL speech enhancement methods using statistical voice conversion and showed that ...