Family and Student Success in Benin: A Comparative Study of Students From Single-Parent and Two-Parent Families in the District of Ketu in Benin

This study examines the living conditions of children from single-parent and two-parent families to assess their academic performance and have an idea of the impact of these two family models (single-parent, two-parent) on the academic success of children in the municipality of Ketu. The quantitative and qualitative survey involved 90 people including 60 students from single-parent and two-parent families on the one hand, and 30 parents in a situation of single parent or two-parent families on the other. The results show that the social and economic living conditions of children from single-parent families are precarious and are not conducive to an efficient academic success when we compare such results to those of children from two-parent families. The study further revealed that the absence of one parent in the household, the difficulties related to the payment of school tuition that might lead to temporary or definite exclusion of the child from school ... are some of the obstacles to school success. As a result, the backup and consolidation of marital bonds turn out to be some of the psychosocial and emotional factors that are required to ensure academic success and, in turn, the future and the full development of children in our societies

Integration of Yoruba language into MaryTTS

This paper presents the integration of Yoruba language into MaryTTS and the evaluation of the resulting text-to-speech (TTS) system using the unit-selection method. Yoruba language sounds system contains 54 elements: 12 vowels, 03 tones for each vowel and 18 consonants. The design of our system is based on the extraction of relevant features from the corpus and their use to select the sequences that can give the best synthesized voice output. The evaluation based on the mean opinion score gave us 2.9 out of 5 as score which is equivalent to a good quality. Integration into MaryTTS consisted in adding Yoruba synthesis component to MaryTTS and making Yoruba language available for usage and sharing for research works. Future work will be performed on some challenges such as objective evaluations of output audio stream, expressiveness (which will need prosodic modification) and hidden markov model synthesis for comparison purposes so as to improve the efficiency

Design of a Yoruba Language Speech Corpus for the Purposes of Text-to-Speech (TTS) Synthesis

This paper deals with the design of a speech corpus for a corpus-based Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesis approach. The purposes are first to provide enough speech to develop Yoruba corpus-based TTS system and second, to provide a simple methodology for other languages corpus design. The paper focuses on text analysis, selection of the reliable sentences, selection of the reader, and sentences recording. The analysis is performed to ensure a good balance of the corpus. Then, 2,415 sentences are gathered (essentially affirmative sentences). Those sentences have been read by a Yoruba language journalist who is a native speaker of the language. There is one speaker for the whole corpus