This study evaluated the voice of a modern English text-to-speech (TTS) system in an English as a foreign language (EFL) context in terms of its speech quality, ability to be understood by L2 users, and potential for focus on specific language forms. Twenty-nine Brazilian EFL learners listened to stories and sentences, produced by a TTS voice and…

Much of speech perception research has focused on brief spectro-temporal properties in the signal, but some studies have shown that adults can recover linguistic form when those properties are absent. In this experiment, 7-year-old English-speaking children demonstrated adultlike abilities to understand speech when only sine waves (SWs)…

Purpose: To examine the influence of visual information on speech intelligibility for a group of speakers with dysarthria associated with Parkinson's disease. Method: Eight speakers with Parkinson's disease and dysarthria were recorded while they read sentences. Speakers performed a concurrent manual task to facilitate typical speech production.…

This study examined the acoustic characteristics of vowels produced by speakers with partial glossectomy. Acoustic variables investigated included first formant (F1) frequency, second formant (F2) frequency, F1 range, F2 range and vowel space area. Data from the speakers with partial glossectomy were compared with age- and gender-matched controls.…

Uses Weinreich's (1953) partition of bilingualism to describe the effects of a small typological distance on the organization of the bilingual lexicon. Using standard Dutch and the dialect of Maastricht, subjects performed an auditory lexical decision task. (30 references) (Author/CK)