BACKGROUND The Digital Speech Aid (DSA) is a pocket-sized device used for speech correction in stutterers. The device modifies the patient's auditory feedback with the use of Delayed Auditory Feedback (DAF) and Frequency-shifted Auditory Feedback (FAF). Both methods are well-known to improve speech fluency in stuttering persons. The aim of this study was to assess immediate disfluency reduction...

Bilingual language production requires that speakers recruit inhibitory control (IC) to optimally balance the activation of more than one linguistic system when they produce speech. Moreover, the amount of IC necessary to maintain an optimal balance is likely to vary across individuals as a function of second language (L2) proficiency and inhibitory capacity, as well as the demands of a particu...

17 DISCOURSE ¡ Gracie: Oh yeah.. . and then Mr. and Mrs. Jones were having matrimonial trouble, and my brother was hired to watch Mrs. Jones. George: Well, I imagine she was a very attractive woman. Gracie: She was, and my brother watched her day and night for six months. George: Well, what happened? Gracie: She finally got a divorce. Up to this point of the book, we have focused primarily on l...

Disfluency is a characteristic feature of spontaneous human speech, commonly seen as a consequence of problems with production. However, the question remains open as to why speakers are disfluent: Is it a mechanical by-product of planning difficulty, or do speakers use disfluency in dialogue to manage listeners' expectations? To address this question, we present two experiments investigating th...

This paper presents our recent work on language identi-cation research using conversational speech (the LDC Conversational Telephone Speech Database). The base-line system used in this study was developed recently ((4, 5]). It is based on language-dependent phone recognition and phonotactic constraints. The system was trained using monologue data and obtained an error rate of around 9% on a com...

The MONOLOGUE system (Multi-Object Negotiator for On-Line Offers Guided by Utility Elicitation) for privacy negotiation is described. It integrates a number of innovative components. Negotiations are alternating offers, where each offer may have multiple attributes which can be scalar-, discreteor set-valued, and so are general enough to allow P3P statements to be negotiated. It relies on the P...

Twenty ten-minute oral presentations made by Swedish students speaking English have been analyzed with respect to the standard deviation of F0 over long stretches of speech. Values have been normalized by division with the mean. Results show a strong correlation between proficiency in English and pitch variation for male speakers but not for females. The results also identify monotone and disfl...