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We investigate the dynamics of labial constriction trajectories during the production of /b/ and /m/ in English and Mandarin. We find that, across languages and contexts, the ratio of instantaneous displacement to instantaneous velocity…
The accuracy of prosodic structure prediction is crucial to the naturalness of synthesized speech in Mandarin text-to-speech system, but now is limited by widely-used sequence-to-sequence framework and error accumulation from previous word…
Prior work has shown that structural supervision helps English language models learn generalizations about syntactic phenomena such as subject-verb agreement. However, it remains unclear if such an inductive bias would also improve language…
Lip-to-speech (L2S) synthesis for Mandarin is a significant challenge, hindered by complex viseme-to-phoneme mappings and the critical role of lexical tones in intelligibility. To address this issue, we propose Lexical Tone-Aware…
This paper explores whether language models can effectively resolve the complex binding patterns of the Mandarin Chinese reflexive ziji, which are constrained by both syntactic and semantic factors. We construct a dataset of 240 synthetic…
Discrete speech units (DSUs) are derived by quantising representations from models trained using self-supervised learning (SSL). They are a popular representation for a wide variety of spoken language tasks, including those where prosody…
For text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis, prosodic structure prediction (PSP) plays an important role in producing natural and intelligible speech. Although inter-utterance linguistic information can influence the speech interpretation of the…
The phonological discrepancies between a speaker's native (L1) and the non-native language (L2) serves as a major factor for mispronunciation. This paper introduces a novel multilingual MDD architecture, L1-MultiMDD, enriched with L1-aware…
Chinese mandarin visual speech recognition (VSR) is a task that has advanced in recent years, yet still lags behind the performance on non-tonal languages such as English. One primary challenge arises from the tonal nature of Mandarin,…
Traditionally, the performance of non-native mispronunciation verification systems relied on effective phone-level labelling of non-native corpora. In this study, a multi-view approach is proposed to incorporate discriminative feature…
Recent advancements in neural end-to-end TTS models have shown high-quality, natural synthesized speech in a conventional sentence-based TTS. However, it is still challenging to reproduce similar high quality when a whole paragraph is…
Most of the successful and predominant methods for bilingual lexicon induction (BLI) are mapping-based, where a linear mapping function is learned with the assumption that the word embedding spaces of different languages exhibit similar…
Vietnamese exhibits substantial dialectal phonetic variation across Northern, Central, and Southern regions, where identical lexical items may be realized with markedly different pronunciations. Such variation poses challenges for automatic…
This article addresses Second Language (L2) writing development through an investigation of new grammatical and structural complexity metrics. We explore the paradigmatic production in learner English by linking language functions to…
Building cross-lingual voice conversion (VC) systems for multiple speakers and multiple languages has been a challenging task for a long time. This paper describes a parallel non-autoregressive network to achieve bilingual and code-switched…
The disparity in phonology between learner's native (L1) and target (L2) language poses a significant challenge for mispronunciation detection and diagnosis (MDD) systems. This challenge is further intensified by lack of annotated L2 data.…
Recent advances in deep learning methods have elevated synthetic speech quality to human level, and the field is now moving towards addressing prosodic variation in synthetic speech.Despite successes in this effort, the state-of-the-art…
As recursion has been underlying any linguistic work for the last 60 years, the acquisition of recursive structures by children during language learning has become a focal point of inquiry. This study delves into the developmental…
This study explores F0 entrainment in second language (L2) English speech imitation during an Alternating Reading Task (ART). Participants with Italian, French, and Slovak native languages imitated English utterances, and their F0…
Vietnamese exhibits extensive dialectal variation, posing challenges for NLP systems trained predominantly on standard Vietnamese. Such systems often underperform on dialectal inputs, especially from underrepresented Central and Southern…