• Modified a neural multi-talker TTS by adding a dysarthria severity level coefficient and a pause insertion model to synthesize dysarthric speech for varying severity levels.
• Providing data augmentation for machine learning tasks such ...

Dysarthria is a motor speech disorder often characterized by reduced speech intelligibility through slow, uncoordinated control of speech production muscles. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems can help dysarthric talkers communicate more ...

• In more naturalistic everyday settings, communication efficiency gradually improves from childhood to adulthood irrespective of the listening condition (easy vs. challenging).
• Even moderate levels of background speech affect ...

Children and older adults have greater difficulty understanding speech when there are other voices in the background (informational masking, IM) than when the interference is a steady-state noise with a similar spectral profile but is not speech (...

• Higher speech intensity and lower speech rates improve automatic speech recognition accuracy.
• Arab ESL teachers and students give more attention to pronunciation errors that do not affect intelligibility.
• Arabic-influenced ESL ...

The present study examines the impact of Arab speakers’ phonological and prosodic features on the accuracy of automatic speech recognition (ASR) of non-native English speech. The authors first investigated the perceptions of 30 Egyptian ESL ...

• Fill the research gap in the field of speech perception among drug addicts.
• Reveal the presence of a disorder or deficit in multi-modal emotional speech processing in drug addicts.
• Suggest that visual cues, such as facial ...

Evidence from previous neurological studies has revealed that drugs can cause severe damage to the human brain structure, leading to significant cognitive disorders in emotion processing, such as psychotic-like symptoms (e.g., speech illusion: ...

• Non-native clear speech is acoustically distinct from casual speech.
• The nature of modifications is the same in native and non-native clear speech.
• The magnitude of modifications is different in native and non-native clear speech. ...

The present study examined the acoustic properties of clear speech produced by non-native speakers of English (L1 Korean), in comparison to native clear speech. L1 Korean speakers of English (N=30) and native speakers of English (N=20) read an ...

The speech emotion recognition (SER) field has been active since it became a crucial feature in advanced Human–Computer Interaction (HCI), and wide real-life applications use it. In recent years, numerous SER systems have been covered by ...

• The speech-emotion recognition (SER) field became crucial in advanced Human-computer interaction (HCI).
• Numerous SER systems have been proposed by researchers using Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL).
• This survey aims to ...

Covert speech is the mental imagery of speaking. This task has gained increasing attention to understand the nature of thought and produce decoding methods for brain–computer interfaces. Building on previous work, we sought to ...

• Understanding speech-related temporal encoding useful for brain-computer interface training.

Previous research has found that human voice can provide reliable information to be used for gender identification with a high level of accuracy. In social psychology, perceived masculinity and femininity (masculinity and femininity ...

• We modelled femininity/masculinity ratings for 129 female/96 male voices.
• ...

• We demonstrate that the accuracy of statements in an eyewitness testimony can be communicated with auditory cues.

In two studies, we examined if correct and incorrect testimony statements were produced with vocally distinct characteristics. Participants watched a staged crime film and were interviewed as eyewitnesses. Witness responses were ...

• Children with hearing loss process speech faster with visual cues.
• Audio-visual benefits are similar to those of children with normal hearing.
• Overall processing speed remains slower than that of children with normal hearing.
• ...

Children with hearing loss (HL) can generally achieve functional speech perception with the assistance of hearing aids and/or cochlear implants. However, their speech processing may be less efficient than that of their peers with normal hearing (...

• Fluency training significantly enhances the interpreter trainees’ speech fluency.

The present study examines the effect of fluency strategy training on the speech fluency of interpreter trainees using a pretest-posttest-delayed posttest design. Moreover, it investigates whether content familiarity influences the ...

• The development of prosodic functions covers a long period, till adolescence.
• ...

The development of prosody covers a long age period, with some functions not well-mastered till adolescence. Moreover, languages show different prosodic developmental trajectories, which can be related to their distinctive ...

• Listeners benefit from visually guided cues for the timing of syllables in noise.

This study examined the effect of visual cues that provide the timing information of syllables in nonsense target sentences on the recognition of target speech against either a speech-spectrum noise masker or a two-talker masker. When ...

• Under pronunciation principles, this paper presents a smartphone-based pronunciation training system for practicing monophthong regarding vowel articulation.

Learning a foreign language pronunciation is the most challenging task for non-native speakers. Improving pronunciation based on feedback on pronunciation error scores is also not easy for learners. Our goal is to develop an ...

Data-driven synthesis of human motion during conversational speech is an active research area with applications that include character animation, computer gaming and conversational agents. Natural looking motion is key to both ...

• Review the motion symmetry of multiple speakers during dyadic conversation.
• ...

Speech emotion recognition (SER) is an essential part of human–computer interaction. Meanwhile, the SER has widely utilized multimodal information in SER in recent years. This paper focuses on exploiting the acoustic and textual ...

• A bimodal network based on an Audio–Text-Interactional-Attention (ATIA) structure and ArcFace loss is proposed.

• New method for recognising the intent of a customer contacting a CC hotline, which is designed specifically for this industry.

Contact centre systems are increasingly using intelligent voicebots and chatbots. These solutions are constantly evolving and improving. One of the main tasks of a virtual assistant is to recognise customers’ ...

• Articulatory space and vowel distinctiveness are independent vowel properties.
• ...

Task-independent (e.g., Ballard et al., 2003) and task-dependent models (e.g., Ziegler, 2003) differ in their predictions regarding the learning transfer from non-speech activities to speech. We argue that singing is ...

• Pluricentric Research on German by means of a listener judgment experiment.
• ...

This article focuses on the perception of standard varieties produced by Austrian and German TV newscasters from the perspective of listeners from both countries, Germany and Austria. Thus, the paper's sociolinguistic scope is located ...

• Visual information for lexical tone is more resilient in running speech than auditory information for tone.

Previous studies show that lexical tones can be discriminated visually, but the locus of this information is unknown. Here we investigate the role of visual face and head information in the production and perception of the six ...