Before they even talk, infants become sensitive to the speech sounds of their native language and recognize the auditory form of an increasing number of words. Traditionally, these early perceptual changes are attributed to an emerging knowledge of linguistic categories such as phonemes or words. However, there is growing skepticism surrounding…

In several applied contexts (e.g., earwitness testimony), the accurate recognition of unfamiliar voices can be a critical part of the person identification process. However, recognising unfamiliar voices is prone to error. While such errors could be reduced by testing the proficiency of listeners, the established tests of unfamiliar voice matching…

In the present research we look into the mechanisms which facilitate integrated functioning of speech and music components within a song. To understand the underlying mechanisms of such interaction we investigate poems set to music, analyzing the components of both speech and music intonation. The study is performed within the scope of Speech…

Language laboratories exist in many language centres across the globe. Situated in the popularity of self-access and computer-assisted language learning in the present era, the study investigated tertiary-level English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' general and, particularly, negative views of speech analysis software. Two hundred and…

Purpose: The speech motor system uses feedforward and feedback control mechanisms that are both reliant on prediction errors. Here, we developed a state-space model to estimate the error sensitivity of the control systems. We examined (a) whether the model accounts for the error sensitivity of the control systems and (b) whether the two systems…

Computer-assisted pronunciation teaching (CAPT) for second-language learners has made great strides in recent years. While once small in number and confined to desktop computers, a great variety of CAPT resources are available online today. These resources provide instructional activities of various types, utilize different sensory modalities, and…

Purpose: General language abilities of children with cochlear implants have been thoroughly investigated, especially at young ages, but far less is known about how well they process language in real-world settings, especially in higher grades. This study addressed this gap in knowledge by examining recognition of sentences with complex syntactic…

Praat is a freeware program widely used by phoneticians for acoustic analyses of speech sounds, though less commonly so for pedagogical purposes. To our knowledge, no research on English pronunciation teaching has used Praat outside a classroom setting. In this article, we would like to report on a voluntary pronunciation-training project and…

Three categories of audio recordings, a web service platform, and commercial software were involved in this analysis process. The three categories of audio recordings included eight filtered student recordings, an audio recording provided by a Mandarin instructor from University Malaysia Sabah, and an audio recording generated by Text-to-Speech…

Purpose: Sarcasm is a specialized speech act in daily vocal communication usually characterized by unique prosodic features, but the role of voice quality in expressing sarcasm has not been explored much. The goal of this study is to explore the voice quality features of Mandarin sarcastic speech in comparison to sincere speech. Method: Fifteen…

Automated alignment of transcriptions to audio files expedites the process of preparing data for acoustic analysis. Unfortunately, the benefits of auto-alignment have generally been available only to researchers studying majority languages, for which large corpora exist and for which acoustic models have been created by large-scale research…

This study investigated the influence of communication apprehension and anxiety in second-language (L2) learning on oral performance of Japanese university students in terms of F0 (fundamental frequency) analysis. The participants were English-major students (3 males and 6 females) who presented at an oral communication festival for university…

All language use reflects the user's social identity in systematic ways. While humans can easily adapt to this sociolinguistic variation, automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems continue to struggle with it. This dissertation makes three main contributions. The first is to provide evidence that modern state-of-the-art commercial ASR systems…

We examine the ability of supervised text classification models to identify several discourse properties from teachers' speech with an eye for providing teachers with meaningful automated feedback about the quality of their classroom discourse. We collected audio recordings from 28 teachers from 10 schools in 164 authentic classroom sessions,…

Despite enormous improvements in AT devices and services in American classrooms, the number of students with special needs, and the complexity of needs that they and their families experience continues to be sky rocketed nationwide. In response to these urgent needs, more advanced and specialized assistive technologies have been developed that…