Related papers: On the Relationship between Accent Strength and Ar…

The way infants use auditory cues to learn to speak despite the acoustic mismatch of their vocal apparatus is a hot topic of scientific debate. The simulation of early vocal learning using articulatory speech synthesis offers a way towards…

Speech production involves the movement of various articulators, including tongue, jaw, and lips. Estimating the movement of the articulators from the acoustics of speech is known as acoustic-to-articulatory inversion (AAI). Recently, it…

This paper investigates the differences occuring in the excitation for different voice qualities. Its goal is two-fold. First a large corpus containing three voice qualities (modal, soft and loud) uttered by the same speaker is analyzed and…

The prosody of a spoken utterance, including features like stress, intonation and rhythm, can significantly affect the underlying semantics, and as a consequence can also affect its textual translation. Nevertheless, prosody is rarely…

Unsupervised representation learning for speech audios attained impressive performances for speech recognition tasks, particularly when annotated speech is limited. However, the unsupervised paradigm needs to be carefully designed and…

Evaluating English ASR systems for conversational AI applications remains difficult, as many publicly available corpora are either pre-segmented into short segments, consist of read or prepared speech, or lack explicit dialect annotations…

Speaker verification (SV) systems are currently being used to make sensitive decisions like giving access to bank accounts or deciding whether the voice of a suspect coincides with that of the perpetrator of a crime. Ensuring that these…

Articulatory information has been shown to be effective in improving the performance of HMM-based and DNN-based text-to-speech synthesis. Speech synthesis research focuses traditionally on text-to-speech conversion, when the input is text…

In-Context Learning (ICL) has been extensively studied in text-only Language Models, but remains largely unexplored in the speech domain. Here, we investigate how linguistic and acoustic features affect ICL in Speech Language Models. We…

A crucial part of an accurate and reliable spoken language assessment system is the underlying ASR model. Recently, large-scale pre-trained ASR foundation models such as Whisper have been made available. As the output of these models is…

We collect novel data in the public service domain to evaluate the capability of the state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) models in capturing regional differences in accents in the United Kingdom (UK), specifically focusing…

The Chinese pronunciation system offers two characteristics that distinguish it from other languages: deep phonemic orthography and intonation variations. We are the first to argue that these two important properties can play a major role…

Deep learning technology has been widely applied to speech enhancement. While testing the effectiveness of various network structures, researchers are also exploring the improvement of the loss function used in network training. Although…

The motor theory of speech perception holds that we perceive the speech of another in terms of a motor representation of that speech. However, when we have learned to recognize a foreign accent, it seems plausible that recognition of a word…

Conjuring up our thoughts, language reflects statistical patterns of word co-occurrences which in turn come to describe how we perceive the world. Whether counting how frequently nouns and verbs combine in Google search queries, or…

The effects of language mismatch impact speech anti-spoofing systems, while investigations and quantification of these effects remain limited. Existing anti-spoofing datasets are mainly in English, and the high cost of acquiring…

Speech accents present a serious challenge to the performance of state-of-the-art end-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. Even with self-supervised learning and pre-training of ASR models, accent invariance is seldom…

We compare phone labels and articulatory features as input for cross-lingual transfer learning in text-to-speech (TTS) for low-resource languages (LRLs). Experiments with FastSpeech 2 and the LRL West Frisian show that using articulatory…

We explore the link between the extent to which syntactic relations are preserved in translation and the ease of correctly constructing a parse tree in a zero-shot setting. While previous work suggests such a relation, it tends to focus on…

Cross-speaker style transfer aims to extract the speech style of the given reference speech, which can be reproduced in the timbre of arbitrary target speakers. Existing methods on this topic have explored utilizing utterance-level style…