Natural fast speech differs from normal-rate speech with respect to its temporal pattern. Previous results showed that word intelligibility of heavily artificially time-compressed speech could not be improved by making its temporal pattern more similar to that of natural fast speech. This might have been due to the extrapolation of timing rules for natural fast speech to rates that are much fas...

This study investigated whether recognition of time-compressed speech predicts recognition of natural fast-rate speech, and whether this relationship is influenced by listener age. High and low context sentences were presented to younger and older normal-hearing adults at a normal speech rate, naturally fast speech rate, and fast rate implemented by time compressing the normal-rate sentences. R...

Two studies were conducted to measure the comprehensibility of synthetic speech with current text-tospeech technology. Baseline measurements for each subject were obtained using recorded natural speech. The first study was conducted in a quiet lab with no distractions. Half the subjects were allowed to take notes while listening, the other half were not. Findings showed that there was no signif...

This paper proposes a new text-to-speech synthesis technique, for producing continuous, natural sounding speech of a speci c speaker. The synthesis technique is based on selecting short speech frames from a phoneme-labeled speech database. The selection procedure involves minimization of a distortion criterion, by a dynamic programming algorithm. The proposed scheme is more exible than many exi...

The speech synthesis approach required in restricted domain speech application is a synthesizer that has high quality like the speech output of ‘slot-filler’ approach but have at least the least flexibility of the ‘genuine’ speech synthesizer. Thus, in this research study, we propose an alternative approach of creating a speech synthesizer to be used in a restricted domain speech application. I...

We studied eight normal subjects in an fMRI experiment where they listened to natural speech sentences and to matched simple or complex speech envelope noises. Neither of the noises (simple or complex) were understood initially, but after the corresponding natural speech sentences had been heard, comprehension was close to perfect for the complex but still absent for the simple speech envelope ...

Many studies have pointed out that the /r/ sounds in Japanese tend to be difficult for native children of Japanese to acquire. To verify this, we first investigated Japanese /r/ sounds uttered by two-year-old twins as a case study. The acoustic analysis of the recordings, which included several words with various /r/ sounds, revealed that certain /r/ sounds are difficult to produce and are ofte...

Acoustic models used for statistical parametric speech synthesis typically incorporate many modelling assumptions. It is an open question to what extent these assumptions limit the naturalness of synthesised speech. To investigate this question, we recorded a speech corpus where each prompt was read aloud multiple times. By combining speech parameter trajectories extracted from different repeti...