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In the beginning, before there are words, or syntax, or discourse, there is speech. Speech is an infant's gateway to language. Without exposure to speech, no language--or at most only a feeble facsimile of language--develops, regardless of how rich a child's biological endowment for language learning may be. But little is given directly in speech--not words, for example, as anyone who has ever listened to fluent conversation in an unfamiliar language can attest. Rather, words and phrases, or rudimentary categories--or whatever other information is required for syntactic and semantic analyses to begin operating--must be pulled from speech through an infant's developing perceptual capacities. By the end of the first year, an infant can segment at least some words from fluent speech. Beyond this, how impoverished or rich an infant's representations of input may be remains largely unknown. Clearly, in the debate over determinants of early language acquisition, the input speech stream has too often been offhandedly dismissed as a potential source of information.This volume brings together internationally-known scholars from a range of disciplines--linguistics, psychology, cognitive and computer science, and acoustics --who share common interests in how speech, in its phonological, prosodic, distributional, and statistical properties, may encode information useful for early language learning, and how such information may be deciphered by very young children. These scholars offer a spectrum of viewpoints on the possibility that aspects of speech may provide bootstraps for language learning; contribute important, state-of-the-art findings across a variety of relevant domains; and illuminate critical directions for future inquiry. The publication of this volume represents a significant step in renewing the bonds between two fields that have long been sundered--speech perception and language acquisition.

The two volumes of these Proceedings contain about 200 conference papers and 10 keynote papers presented at the First International Conference on Construction Materials and Structures, held in Johannesburg, South Africa from 24 to 26 November 2014. It includes sections on Materials and characterization; Durability of construction materials; Structural implications, performance, service life; Sustainability, waste utilization, the environment; and Building science and construction.

Concrete and cement-based materials must operate in increasingly aggressive aqueous environments, which may be either natural or industrial. These materials may suffer degradation in which ion addition and/or ion exchange reactions occur, leading to a breakdown of the matrix microstructure and consequent weakening. Sometimes this degradation can be extremely rapid and serious such as in acidic environments, while in other cases degradation occurs over long periods. Consequences of material failure are usually severe – adversely affecting the health and well-being of human communities and disturbing ecological balances. There are also large direct costs of maintaining and replacing deteriorated infrastructure and indirect costs from loss of production during maintenance work, which place a great burden on society. The focus of this book is on addressing issues concerning performance of cement-based materials in aggressive aqueous environments, by way of this State-of-the-Art Report. The book represents the work of many well-known and respected authors who contributed chapters or parts of chapters. Four main themes were addressed: I. Nature and kinetics of degradation and deterioration mechanisms of cement-based materials in aggressive aqueous environments, II. Modelling of deterioration in such environments, III. Test methods to assess performance of cement-based materials in such environments, and which can be used to characterise and rate relative performance and inform long term predictions, IV. Engineering implications and consequences of deterioration in aggressive aqueous environments, and engineering approaches to the problem.

Eco-efficient concrete is a comprehensive guide to the characteristics and environmental performance of key concrete types.Part one discusses the eco-efficiency and life cycle assessment of Portland cement concrete, before part two goes on to consider concrete with supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs). Concrete with non-reactive wastes is the focus of part three, including municipal solid waste incinerator (MSWI) concrete, and concrete with polymeric, construction and demolition wastes (CDW). An eco-efficient approach to concrete carbonation is also reviewed, followed by an investigation in part four of future alternative binders and the use of nano and biotech in concrete production.With its distinguished editors and international team of expert contributors, Eco-efficient concrete is a technical guide for all professionals, researchers and academics currently or potentially involved in the design, manufacture and use of eco-efficient concrete. - The first part of the book examines the eco-efficiency and life cycle assessment of Portland cement concrete - Chapters in the second part of the book consider concrete with supplementary cementitious materials, including properties and performance - Reviews the eco-efficient approach to concrete carbonation

An Introduction to Text-to-Speech Synthesis is a comprehensive introduction to the subject. The author treats two areas of speech synthesis: Part I of the book concerns natural language processing and the inherent problems it presents for speech synthesis; Part II focuses on digital signal processing, with an emphasis on the concatenative approach. Both parts of the text guide the reader through the material in a step-by-step easy-to-follow way. This is the first book to treat the topic of speech synthesis from the perspective of two different engineering approaches. The book will be of interest to researchers and students in phonetics and speech communication, in both academia and industry.

ANTONIS BOTINIS 1. 1 Background This introduction provides essential information about the structure and the objects of study of this volume. Following the introduction, fourteen papers which represent current research on intonation are organised into five thematic sections: (I) Overview of Intonation, (II) Prominence and Focus, (III) Boundaries and Discourse, (IV) Intonation Modelling, and (V) Intonation Technology. Within the sections the papers are arranged thematically, although several papers which deal with various aspects of intonation and prosody are basically intersectional. As the title indicates,'Intonation: Analysis, Modelling and Technology'is a contribution to the study of prosody, with major emphasis on intonation. Intonation and tonal themes are thus the central object of the volume, although temporal and dynamic aspects are also taken into consideration by a good number of papers. Although tonal and prosodic distinctions have been dealt with throughout man's literate history with reference to the study of language, for example by classical philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, it is in recent decades that we have witnessed the most fertile growth in intonation studies, as with experimental phonetics and speech technology in general. As Rossi (this volume) points out, intonation research really began to blossom in the sixties with a multi­ fold increase in prosodic studies, reflected in contributions to the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS), and in the international literature.

Serious degradation mechanisms can severely reduce the service life of concrete structures: steel reinforcement can corrode, cement matrix can be attacked, and even aggregates can show detrimental processes. Therefore, it is important to understand how damage can occur to concrete structures and to appreciate the timing of the actions leading to damage. Damage to Concrete Structures summarizes the state-of-the-art information on the degradation of concrete structures, and gives a clear and comprehensive overview of what can go wrong. Offering a logical flow, the chapters are ordered according to the chronological timing of the actions leading to concrete damage. The author explains the different actions or mechanisms in a fundamental manner, without too many physical or chemical details, to provide greater clarity and readability. The book describes the different causes of damage to concrete, including inappropriate design, errors during execution, mechanisms occurring during hardening of concrete, and actions or degradation mechanisms during service life (hardened concrete). The degradation mechanisms are illustrated with numerous real-world examples and many drawings and photographs taken of actual structures. Written as a textbook for students as well as a reference for professionals, this easy-to-comprehend book gives readers a deeper understanding of the damage that can occur to concrete during the construction process and service.

Pitch (i.e., fundamental frequency FO and fundamental period TO) occupies a key position in the acoustic speech signal. The prosodic information of an utterance is predominantly determined by this parameter. The ear is more sensitive to changes of fundamental frequency than to changes of other speech signal parameters by an order of magnitude. The quality of vocoded speech is essentially influenced by the quality and faultlessness of the pitch measure­ ment. Hence the importance of this parameter necessitates using good and reliable measurement methods. At first glance the task looks simple: one just has to detect the funda­ mental frequency or period of a quasi-periodic signal. For a number of reasons, however, the task of pitch determination has to be counted among the most difficult problems in speech analysis. 1) In principle, speech is a nonstationary process; the momentary position of the vocal tract may change abruptly at any time. This leads to drastic variations in the temporal structure of the signal, even between subsequent pitch periods, and assuming a quasi-periodic signal is often far from realistic. 2) Due to the flexibility of the human vocal tract and the wide variety of voices, there exist a multitude of possible temporal structures. Narrow-band formants at low harmonics (especially at the second or third harmonic) are an additional source of difficulty. 3) For an arbitrary speech signal uttered by an unknown speaker, the fundamental frequency can vary over a range of almost four octaves (50 to 800 Hz).

Data-Driven Techniques in Speech Synthesis gives a first review of this new field. All areas of speech synthesis from text are covered, including text analysis, letter-to-sound conversion, prosodic marking and extraction of parameters to drive synthesis hardware. Fuelled by cheap computer processing and memory, the fields of machine learning in particular and artificial intelligence in general are increasingly exploiting approaches in which large databases act as implicit knowledge sources, rather than explicit rules manually written by experts. Speech synthesis is one application area where the new approach is proving powerfully effective, the reliance upon fragile specialist knowledge having hindered its development in the past. This book provides the first review of the new topic, with contributions from leading international experts. Data-Driven Techniques in Speech Synthesis is at the leading edge of current research, written by well respected experts in the field. The text is concise and accessible, and guides the reader through the new technology. The book will primarily appeal to research engineers and scientists working in the area of speech synthesis. However, it will also be of interest to speech scientists and phoneticians as well as managers and project leaders in the telecommunications industry who need an appreciation of the capabilities and potential of modern speech synthesis technology.

When we speak, we configure the vocal tract which shapes the visible motions of the face and the patterning of the audible speech acoustics. Similarly, we use these visible and audible behaviors to perceive speech. This book showcases a broad range of research investigating how these two types of signals are used in spoken communication, how they interact, and how they can be used to enhance the realistic synthesis and recognition of audible and visible speech. The volume begins by addressing two important questions about human audiovisual performance: how auditory and visual signals combine to access the mental lexicon and where in the brain this and related processes take place. It then turns to the production and perception of multimodal speech and how structures are coordinated within and across the two modalities. Finally, the book presents overviews and recent developments in machine-based speech recognition and synthesis of AV speech.

Multimodal signal processing is an important research and development field that processes signals and combines information from a variety of modalities – speech, vision, language, text – which significantly enhance the understanding, modelling, and performance of human-computer interaction devices or systems enhancing human-human communication. The overarching theme of this book is the application of signal processing and statistical machine learning techniques to problems arising in this multi-disciplinary field. It describes the capabilities and limitations of current technologies, and discusses the technical challenges that must be overcome to develop efficient and user-friendly multimodal interactive systems. With contributions from the leading experts in the field, the present book should serve as a reference in multimodal signal processing for signal processing researchers, graduate students, R&D engineers, and computer engineers who are interested in this emerging field. - Presents state-of-art methods for multimodal signal processing, analysis, and modeling - Contains numerous examples of systems with different modalities combined - Describes advanced applications in multimodal Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) as well as in computer-based analysis and modelling of multimodal human-human communication scenes.

'This book provides practitioners and researchers with information that will allow them to better assist the speech disabled who wish to utilize computer synthesized speech (CSS) technology'--Provided by publisher.

L'intérêt de cet ouvrage réside dans la présentation d'une méthode d'analyse originale de la prosodie, et en particulier de la mélodie. La méthode utilisée élargit l'analyse à l'ensemble des unités lexicales et conduit l'investigation dans plusieurs réseaux par nature imbriqués, syntaxiques, sémantiques et pragmatiques. Dépassant la voie la plus souvent explorée dans les travaux actuels, la méthode s'ouvre également, pour mieux rendre compte des stratégies mises en place par les locuteurs à plusieurs réseaux d'analyse concurrents dans le domaine du sens.

Speech processing addresses various scientific and technological areas. It includes speech analysis and variable rate coding, in order to store or transmit speech. It also covers speech synthesis, especially from text, speech recognition, including speaker and language identification, and spoken language understanding. This book covers the following topics: how to realize speech production and perception systems, how to synthesize and understand speech using state-of-the-art methods in signal processing, pattern recognition, stochastic modelling computational linguistics and human factor studies.

This book introduces the finite element method applied to the resolution of industrial heat transfer problems. Starting from steady conduction, the method is gradually extended to transient regimes, to traditional non-linearities, and to convective phenomena. Coupled problems involving heat transfer are then presented. Three types of couplings are discussed: coupling through boundary conditions (such as radiative heat transfer in cavities), addition of state variables (such as metallurgical phase change), and coupling through partial differential equations (such as electrical phenomena). A review of the various thermal phenomena is drawn up, which an engineer can simulate. The methods presented will enable the reader to achieve optimal use from finite element software and also to develop new applications.

From common consumer products such as cell phones and MP3 players to more sophisticated projects such as human-machine interfaces and responsive robots, speech technologies are now everywhere. Many think that it is just a matter of time before more applications of the science of speech become inescapable in our daily life. This handbook is meant to play a fundamental role for sustainable progress in speech research and development. Springer Handbook of Speech Processing targets three categories of readers: graduate students, professors and active researchers in academia and research labs, and engineers in industry who need to understand or implement some specific algorithms for their speech-related products. The handbook could also be used as a sourcebook for one or more graduate courses on signal processing for speech and different aspects of speech processing and applications. A quickly accessible source of application-oriented, authoritative and comprehensive information about these technologies, it combines the established knowledge derived from research in such fast evolving disciplines as signal processing and communications, acoustics, computer science and linguistics.

Finally, there is a reference that specifically provides detailed historical and in-depth, year-by-year operational and statistical profiles of all the commercial air transport concerns extant worldwide during the past 90 years. The 6,556 entries are arranged alphabetically to facilitate ease of use. This encyclopedia profiles all airlines including charter passenger planes, cargo airlines (major, commuter, and taxi), as well as specialized operators such as forest fire-fighting concerns, offshore helicopter services, and even pioneering airship operators like DELAG. Each profile receives individual chronological coverage, and every effort has been made to provide currency and postscripts listing name changes, mergers, and failures from late 2000 into December 2001. If the airline is still flying, full data is provided including addresses, telephone numbers, web URLs, two-letter IATA or three-letter ICAO codes, and year founded. For the most part, company portraits are provided under the most recent airline name, as well as predecessor identity. Name, nationality and dates of operation note companies that have dissolved. In addition to the company reviews supplied by aviation press, commercial monographs, government sources, and the general news media, data is also provided on: _ Accidents and incidents _ Terrorism and in-flight crime (reports of hijackings entire story from start to finish) _ Government service in war and peace (including covert operation) _ Detailed company histories of all airlines _ Lists'code-sharing'partnerships and pacts with other carriers _ Includes financial information on major carriers (i.e. number of employees, numbers of annual passengers flown, profit, earnings, etc.) _ Literary or film production involvement _ Links to major sporting events like the Olympic Games _ Natural disasters _ Routes

Machu Picchu, les Indiens, les Incas, les Andes, les flûtes de pan, le Pérou fait rêver et conduit des milliers de touristes internationaux à tenter l'aventure andine. La croissance du tourisme est symbole d'un retour à la normalité pour un pays dont l'image au début des années 90 était associée au terrorisme, au choléra et à la crise économique. Son étude constitue une approche insolite des réalités péruviennes contemporaines. Elle révèle également des comportements parfois singuliers de'l'homo turisticus'en vacances en terra incognita.