PURPOSE This study explored the use of assessment tasks to examine underlying phonological representations in preschool children with speech impairment. The study also investigated the association between performance on phonological representation tasks and phonological awareness development. METHOD The performance of 9 children (aged 3;09 [years; months] to 5;03) with moderate or severe spee...

Model compensation techniques for noise-robust speech recognition approximate the corrupted speech distribution. This paper introduces a sampling method that, given speech and noise distributions and a mismatch function, in the limit calculates the corrupted speech likelihood exactly. Though it is too slow to compensate a speech recognition system, it enables a more fine-grained assessment of c...

The Speech Transcription Analysis Tool (STAT) is an open source tool for aligning and comparing two phonetically transcribed texts of human speech. The output analysis is a parameterized set of phonological differences. These differences are based upon a selectable set of binary phonetic features such as [voice], [continuant], [high], etc. STAT was initially designed to provide sets of phonolog...

In this paper, we validate the application of an established personality assessment and modeling paradigm to speech input, and extend earlier work towards text independent speech input. We show that human labelers can consistently label acted speech data generated across multiple recording sessions, and investigate further which of the 5 scales in the NEO-FFI scheme can be assessed from speech,...

hypernasality is a frequently occurring resonance disorder in children with cleft palate. generally an operation is necessary to reduce the hypernasality and therefore an assessment of hypernasality is imperative to quantify the effect of the surgery and design the speech therapy sessions which are crucial after surgery. in this paper, a new quantitative method is proposed to estimate hypernasa...

Recent innovations in 3D motion capture technology such as electromagnetic articulography (EMA) are providing unprecedented access to the intricate movements of the articulators during speech production. Although these technological advances afford exciting opportunities for advancing the assessment and treatment of speech, they have presented new challenges associated with data collection, pro...

In this paper we present the properties of a parametric speech model based on a deterministic plus noise representation of speech initially suggested by Laroche et al. [1]. Aiming at a high resolution analysis of speech signals for voice quality control (transformation) and assessment, we focus on the deterministic representation and we reveal the properties of the model showing that such a rep...

In the framework of the EU funded project TC-STAR (Technology and Corpora for Speech to Speech Translation), research on TTS aims on providing a synthesized voice sounding like the source speaker speaking the target language. To progress in this direction, research is focused on naturalness, intelligibility, expressivity and voice conversion both, in the TC-STAR framework. For this purpose, spe...