Outside of Western contexts, natural-conversation-based research on intergenerational communication is relatively rare. To help redress this imbalance, this paper explores the conversational styles of first-encounter talks between five pairs of college students and older adults in Taiwan, and infers the interactional norms that underlie them. It is found that younger Taiwanese adults tend to ex...

PURPOSE It is established that speaking clearly is an effective means of enhancing intelligibility. Because any signal-processing scheme modeled after known acoustic-phonetic features of clear speech will likely affect both target and competing speech, it is important to understand how speech recognition is affected when a competing speech signal is also spoken clearly. In 2 experiments, the au...

For synthesizing voice quality expressed by adjectives, this paper investigates acoustical correlates to adjective ratings of speaker characteristics for reading and conversational speech. The results revealed: (1) The speaking styles have little effect on the rates on adjective scales. (2) The effects of formant frequencies and long-term spectrum to adjective ratings are almost independent of ...

CNGL, School of Computer Science and Informatics, University College Dublin Dublin, Ireland {eva.szekely|mohamed.abou-zleikha}@ucdconnect.ie, {joao.cabral|peter.cahill|julie.berndsen}@ucd.ie Abstract Audiobooks are a rich resource of large quantities of natural sounding, highly expressive speech. In our previous research we have shown that it is possible to detect different expressive voice sty...

This study extended the research on the scaffolding provided by mothers while reading picture books with their children from a focus on conversational styles related to labeling to a focus on those related to agents and actions to clarify the process by which language develops from the one-word to the syntactic stage. We clarified whether mothers decreased the degree of scaffolding in their ini...

In this paper, an attempt is made to automatically identify the activity a meeting is in. The input used in this identification is the frequency of each possible conversational state, and the frequency with which each speakers speaks. A number of classifiers were created and trained, and they performed very well when it was known in advance when an meeting switched activities. The performance, ...

The focus of computerised learning has shifted from content delivery towards personalised online learning with Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS). Oscar Conversational ITS (CITS) is a sophisticated ITS that uses a natural language interface to enable learners to construct their own knowledge through discussion. Oscar CITS aims to mimic a human tutor by dynamically detecting and adapting to an i...

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Our goal is to collect a speech corpus for the purpose of studying intelligibility and acoustic differences between the conversational and clear speech styles. The ideal corpus has the following properties: (1) speech has been produced spontaneously as part of a communicative interaction, as opposed to having been read to an imagined interlocutor; (2) entire identical utterances, or large parts...