Intelligibility of speech addressed to children

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Prosodic marking of contrasts in information structure

Successful dialogue requires cultivation of com-mon ground (Clark, 1996), shared information, which changes as the conversation proceeds. Dialogue partners can maintain common ground by using different modalities like eye gaze, facial expressions, gesture, content information or in-tonation. Here, we focus on intonation and inves-tigate how contrast in information structure is prosodically marked in spontaneous speech. Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG, Steedman 2000) distinguishes theme and rheme as elements of information structure. In some cases they can be distinguished by the pitch ac-cent with which the corresponding words are realised. We experimentally evoke instances o

Comparing Human And Automatic Speech Recognition Using Word Gating

This paper describes a study in which we compare human and automatic recognition of words in fluent and disfluent spontaneous speech. In a word-level gating study with confidence judgements, we examine how the recognition and confidence of recognition of words by humans develops over utterances and show how disfluency disrupts the process. We give an automatic recogniser the same task and compare its performance with the humans'. With both systems, subsequent context supports word recognition: confidence in word recognition peaks after subsequent words have been heard. With both systems, disfluency adversely affects recognition of words in the immediate vicinity of the disfluent interruption (for repeats and repairs): disrupted subsequent context disrupts the recognition process. 1. INTRODUCTION Spontaneous speech is disfluent: speakers need time to formulate utterances and often make changes on the fly, so pauses, repetitions and restarts abound. Until recently, models of speech rec..

Disfluency in dialogue : attention, structure and function

Spontaneous speech is replete with disfluencies: pauses, hesitations, restarts, and less than ideal deliveries of information. Disfluency is a topic of interdisciplinary research with insights from psycholinguistics, phonetics and speech technology. Researchers have tried to determine: When does disfluency occur?, Can disfluency be reliably predicted to occur?, and ultimately, Why does disfluency occur? The focus of my thesis will be to address the question of why disfluency occurs by reporting the results of analyses of disfluency frequency and the relationship between disfluency and eye gaze in a collaborative dialogue. Psycholinguistic studies of disfluency and collaborative dialogue differ on their answers to why disfluency occurs and its role in dialogue. One hypothesis, which I will refer to as Strategic Modelling, suggests that disfluencies are designed by the speaker. According to the alternative view, which I will call the Cognitive Burden View, disfluency is the result of an overburdened language production system. Throughout this thesis, I will contrast these two theories for an ultimate answer to why disfluency occurs. Each hypothesis attaches a functional role to a structural definition of disfluency and therefore in order to determine why disfluency occurs, I will contrast the structural and functional characteristics of disfluency. I will attempt to do this by analysing the dialogue behaviour in terms of speech goals and eye gaze behaviour a speaker is engaged in when they make certain types of disfluencies. A multi-modal Map Task paradigm was used in this thesis, in which speakers were asked to describe the route on a cartoon map to a distant confederate listener who provided either visual or verbal feedback. Speakers were eye-tracked during the dialogue and a record was kept of when the speaker attended to the listener’s visual feedback. Experiment 1 tested the visual feedback paradigm to establish its validity as a baseline condition. Speakers were found to make more disfluencies when they could interact with the visual feedback, suggesting disfluency is more common in interactive circumstances. Experiment 2 added verbal feedback to the experimental paradigm to test whether listeners react differently to the two modalities of feedback. Speakers made more disfluencies when the feedback was more complicated. Structural disfluency types were also observed to fulfil different functions. Finally, Experiment 3 manipulated the motivation of the speaker and found that Motivated speakers gazed more often and were more disfluent per opportunity than Control speakers suggesting that highly motivated subjects are more willing to engage in difficult tasks.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Le traitement du genre grammatical en français langue première et seconde

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