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Purpose: This study examined the effects of Speech Intelligibility Treatment (SIT) on intelligibility and naturalness of narrative speech produced by francophone children with dysarthria due to cerebral palsy. Method: Ten francophone children with dysarthria were randomized to one of two treatments, SIT or Hand-Arm Bimanual Intensive Therapy Including Lower Extremities, a physical therapy (PT) treatment. Both treatments were conducted in a camp setting and were comparable in dosage. The children were recorded pre- and posttreatment producing a story narrative. Intelligibility was measured by means of 60 blinded listeners' orthographic transcription accuracy (percentage of words transcribed correctly). The listeners also rated the children's naturalness on a visual analogue scale. Results: A significant pre- to posttreatment increase in intelligibility was found for the SIT group, but not for the PT group, with great individual variability observed among the children. No significant changes were found for naturalness ratings or sound pressure level in the SIT group or the PT group posttreatment. Articulation rate increased in both treatment groups, although not differentially across treatments. Conclusions: Findings from this first treatment study on intelligibility in francophone children with dysarthria suggest that SIT shows promise for increasing narrative intelligibility in this population. Acoustic contributors to the increased intelligibility remain to be explored further. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of an internally versus externally cued speech task on perceived understandability and naturalness in speakers with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and cerebellar disease (CD). Method: Sentences extracted from a covertly recorded conversation (internally cued) were compared to the same sentences read aloud (externally cued) by speakers with PD and a clinical comparison group of speakers with CD. Experienced listeners rated the speech samples using a visual analog scale for the perceptual dimensions of understandability and naturalness. Results: Results suggest that experienced listeners rated the speech of participants with PD as significantly more natural and more understandable during the reading condition. Participants with CD were also rated as significantly more understandable during the reading condition, but ratings of naturalness did not differ between conversation and reading. Conclusions: Speech tasks can have a pronounced impact on perceived speech patterns. For individuals with PD, both understandability and naturalness can improve during reading tasks versus conversational tasks. The speech benefits from reading may be attributed to several mechanisms, including possible improvement from an externally cued speech task. These findings have implications for speech task selection in evaluating individuals with dysarthria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Although dysarthria affects the large majority of individuals with cerebral palsy (CP) and can substantially complicate everyday communication, previous research has provided an incomplete picture of its clinical features. We aimed to comprehensively describe characteristics of dysarthria in adults with CP and to elucidate the impact of dysarthric symptoms on parameters relevant for communication. Method: Forty-two adults with CP underwent speech assessment by means of standardized auditory rating scales. Listening experiments were conducted to obtain communication-related parameters--that is, intelligibility and naturalness--as well as age and gender estimates. Results: The majority of adults with CP showed moderate to severe dysarthria with symptoms on all dimensions of speech, most prominently voice quality, respiration, and prosody. Regression analyses revealed that articulatory, respiratory, and prosodic features were the strongest predictors of intelligibility and naturalness of speech. Listeners' estimates of the speakers' age and gender were predominantly determined by voice parameters. Conclusion: This study provides an overview on the clinical presentation of dysarthria in a convenience sample of adults with CP. The complexity of the functional impairment described and the consequences on the individuals' communication call for a stronger consideration of dysarthria in CP both in clinical care and in research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The memory space and bandwidth may be limited in speech signal communication. To solve the problem, a low rate speech coding and decoding system has been developed to realize speech communication with a high condensation. This system is composed of micro-controller STM32, special speech processor TR600, speech codec chip TLV320AIC10, speech acquisition and playback circuit. This design can code and decode speech in 0. 6 Kbps, 0. 8 Kbps, 1. 2 Kbps and 2. 4 Kbps. The tests show that the system' s reconstructive speech could maintain high naturalness, articulation and intelligibility, hence it reflects the design is feasible, stable and valuable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pitch (F0) modification is one of the most important problems in the area of speech synthesis. Several techniques have been developed in the literature to achieve this goal. The main restrictions of these techniques are in the modification range and the synthesised speech quality, intelligibility and naturalness. The control of formants in a spoken language can significantly improve the naturalness of the synthesised speech. This improvement is mainly dependent on the control of the first formant (F1). Inspired by this observation, this article proposes a new approach that modifies bothF0andF1of Arabic voiced sounds in order to improve the naturalness of the pitch shifted speech. The developed strategy takes a parallel processing approach, in which the analysis segments are decomposed into sub-bands in the wavelet domain, modified in the desired sub-band by using a resampling technique and reconstructed without affecting the remained sub-bands. Pitch marking and voicing detection are performed in the frequency decomposition step based on the comparison of the multi-level approximation and detail signals. The performance of the proposed technique is evaluated by listening tests and compared to the pitch synchronous overlap and add (PSOLA) technique in the third approximation level. Experimental results have shown that the manipulation in the wavelet domain ofF0in conjunction withF1guarantees natural-sounding of the synthesised speech compared to the classical pitch modification technique. This improvement was appropriate for high pitch modifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper analyzes the impacts of machine translation and speech synthesis on speech-to-speech translation systems. A typical speech-to-speech translation system consists of three components: speech recognition, machine translation and speech synthesis. Many techniques have been proposed for integration of speech recognition and machine translation. However, corresponding techniques have not yet been considered for speech synthesis. The focus of the current work is machine translation and speech synthesis, and we present a subjective evaluation designed to analyze their impact on speech-to-speech translation. The results of these analyses show that the naturalness and intelligibility of the synthesized speech are strongly affected by the fluency of the translated sentences. In addition, several features were found to correlate well with the average fluency of the translated sentences and the average naturalness of the synthesized speech. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The effectiveness of using speech rate-conversion software by artificially decreasing sound waveforms without changing the pitch was studied in 62 individuals with dysarthria. Besides having patients read a standard common passage entitled "The North Wind and the Sun" aloud, they had casual conversations on a different occasion. Both reading and conversations were recorded on a digital audiocassette recorder in a sound- treated studio. Using speech rate-conversion software, the two types of speech samples (reading and speaking) were played back under 5 rate-delay conditions (100, 150, 200, 250, and 300% slower than the original recording) for evaluation of intelligibility and naturalness by 3 speech and language pathologists. With regard to both intelligibility and naturalness, a significant difference was observed among the 5 rate-delay conditions regardless of the type and severity of dysarthria. A 200% delay in rate delivered the greatest improvement in intelligibility; conversely, any rate-delay less or more than 200% resulted in slight deterioration. In addition, a 150% rate-delay in speech yielded the greatest improvement in naturalness, while any delay less or more than 150% resulted in a significant deteriorating tendency. These findings suggest that reducing verbal speed within the range of 150 - 200% may be useful in the clinical management of dysarthria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Prosodic structure generation is the key component in improving the intelligibility and naturalness of synthetic speech for a text-to-speech (TTS) system. This paper investigates the problem of automatic segmentation of prosodic word and prosodic phrase, which are two fundamental layers in the hierarchical prosodic structure of Mandarin, and presents a two-stage prosodic structure generation strategy. Conditional random fields (CRF) models are built for both prosodic word and prosodic phrase prediction at the front end with different feature selections. Besides, a transformation-based error-driven learning (TBL) modification module is introduced in the back end to amend the initial prediction. Experiment results show that the approach combining CRF and TBL achieves an F-score of 94.66 %. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a novel two-scale auditory feature based algorithm for non-intrusive evaluation of speech quality. The neuron firing probabilities along the length of the basilar membrane, from an explicit auditory model, are used to extract features from the distorted speech signal. This is in contrast to previous methods, which either use standard vocal tract based features, or incorporate only some aspects of the human auditory perception mechanism. The features are extracted at two scales, namely a global scale spanning all voiced frames in an utterance, and a local scale spanning voiced frames from contiguous voiced segments in the utterance. This is followed by a simple information fusion at the score level using Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs). The use of an explicit auditory model to extract features is based on the premise that similar processing (in a qualitative sense) happens in human speech perception. In addition, auditory feature extraction at two scales incorporates the effects of both long term and short term distortions on speech quality. The proposed algorithm is shown to perform at least as good as the ITU-T Recommendation P.563. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the use of comprehensibility in ancient times. It informs that comprehensibility occurs in the context of rhetorical stylistics in relation to the five classical principles of style. As mentioned, comprehensibility or intelligibility is one of the parts of these principles which represent the communicative side of clarity. The restrictions of intelligibility occur due to clarity's relation to other principles of styles which include brevity and ornamentation. This article provides the principles of naturalness and vividness in the ancient times in terms of intelligibility.