This paper investigates what voice features (e.g., speech rate and pitch-formants) make a teacher’s voice preferable for second language learners to imitate, when they practice sentence pronunciation using Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) systems. The CAPT system employed in our investigation uses a single teacher’s voice as the source to automatically resynthesize several sample...

As a major Chinese dialect, Cantonese is well known for its complex tone system. This paper applies the commandresponse model to represent the F0 contours of Cantonese speech. Analysis-by-Synthesis is conducted on both utterances of carrier sentences and utterances with less constrained structures, from which a set of appropriate tone command patterns is derived. By intrinsically incorporating ...

In this paper, we study the intervector correlations of some parameters often employed in speech coding. The speech parameters show a switched behavior, with high correlation for most vectors, but low intervector correlation for a few. We demonstrate that a quantization scheme that takes the switched behavior into account can outperform traditional methods.

In this treatise a range of Line Spectrum Frequency (LSF) Vector Quantization (VQ) schemes were studied comparatively, which were designed for wideband speech codecs. Both predictive arrangements and memoryless schemes were investigated. Specifically, both memoryless Split Vector Quantization (SVQ) and Classified Vector Quantization (CVQ) were studied. These techniques exhibit a low complexity ...