This study investigated the acoustic basis of across-utterance, within-speaker variation in speech naturalness for four speakers with dysarthria secondary to Parkinson's disease (PD). Speakers read sentences and produced spontaneous speech. Acoustic measures of fundamental frequency, phrase-final syllable lengthening, intensity and speech rate were obtained. A group of listeners judged speech n...

This study aims to identify the crucial prosodic factor for native speakers’ naturalness judgement of L2 pronunciation. Prosodic features are known to have more impact on the naturalness of L2 learners’ pronunciation than segmental features do. Among prosodic features, timing and pitch are looked at in this study as major prosodic factors which affect native speakers’ naturalness judgement of L...

A naturalness bias has been defined as ‘a preference for things perceived as natural’. This paper makes a first attempt at answering the question whether a naturalness bias exist in the context of lighting, and whether people’s sense of personal connection to nature and their beliefs towards different types of lighting affect its occurrence. This exploratory paper uses four studies to evaluate ...