Speech Coding Research Articles

‘When the tongue slips it tells the truth’: tricks and truths of the Renaissance lapsus*

The lapsus, like gossip and nonsense, is a type of language that exceeds – or claims to exceed – the speaker's intent. This article investigates various manifestations of the lapsus in Renaissance discourse: does it pertain to the speaker or the hearer? What are the frontiers between the lapsus and the pun? What criteria separate speaking without thinking from speaking deliberately, an innocent mistake from calculated duplicity? Indeed, there are cases of false lapsus, orchestrated to give free rein to transgressive statements. In these there is a deliberate use of apparent unawareness for strategic purposes. In the sixteenth century, authorial intention was challenged by a new category, authorial inattention, which was developed as a means to escape the censors. The phenomenon takes on new importance during the Renaissance owing to technological advances in translating and fixing discourse, and also to the disciplining of European society, in which conduct books rein in impulsive expression by dictating increasingly strict codes of behaviour and speech. Many were interested in language that moved out of control, particularly in a religious, legal or political context. The lapsus cannot be viewed as a harmless lack of rigour: it becomes a real threat when fixed in print, ensuring a wide circulation.

Two Codes for Remedying Problematic Situations: Japanese and English Speakers’ Views of Explanations and Apologies in the United States

This study describes speech codes used by Japanese and English speakers in remedying problematic situations. By analyzing in-depth interviews, the study reveals the Japanese-speaking participants’ use of a code in which offering detailed explanations can be a way to deny having caused another person discomfort, thus being incompatible with their meaning of “apology.” The English-speaking participants used a code in which offering and listening to explanations is a way to show that they care about the relationship and to seek forgiveness. The analysis illustrates how the participants used these codes as a resource to draw a boundary between two speech communities.

“TO SPEAK AS OTHERS SPEAK”: PRIVILEGED AND “VULGAR” VOICES IN EVELINA, BY FRANCES BURNEY

ABSTRACTIn 1783, James Beattie wrote that “to speak as others speak” was crucial for social concord. The eighteenth century witnessed a move towards standardization of language, and a growing consensus about rules of conversation, governed by context. Yet towards the end of the century, there developed an aesthetic which privileged naturalness and sincerity over artifice and imitation. This created a conundrum, for how could everyone “speak as others speak” without some form of imitation? And it raised the question of whose speech practices should establish a central variety and a mainstream way of interacting. Further, what should such a variety and speech code signify? The novelist Frances Burney engaged with such issues. In Burney's fiction, standard language and natural, polite discourse signify morally grounded characters, whose dialogue correlates with the narrative voices. However, as Burney's first novel, Evelina, or, The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World (1778), demonstrates, although her work can be seen to be linguistically conservative, it uses such correlations to create alternative hierarchies, based on moral rather than social evaluations. This dissolving of moral and linguistic boundaries between speakers critiques representatives of the social elite and the use they make of their power, drawing attention to the insidious, corrupting influence they have over those who emulate them.

Language as an Index of Identity, Power, Solidarity and Sentiment in the Multicultural Community of Wollo

Language serves different functions in different societies. The target group in this study uses their language for different purposes. This study is aimed at investigating the functions of the in-group code of the speech group, the most obvious characteristic feature of which is maintaining their religious and linguistic identity and making use of the language as an expression of power in their social structure. Language serves instrumental, symbolic, cognitive, sentimental, and other functions in the target community. In its instrumental function, language controls access to power, opportunity and material resources. Language carries an enormous political, social and economic power. In its symbolic function, language indexes identity. In terms of the cognitive dimension, language serves to influences the belief and thought systems of the speakers. The sentimental function of the code is maintained as a result of sanctity being attached with their religion. The speech code of the target community makes use of their language as an expression of identity. They reconstructed their religious and linguistic identity in the code they speak. By so doing they maintained Ethiopic or Amhara Identity. They indigenize or localize their religion, Islam, so that they wouldn’t be considered foreign in their own homeland. They also revealed Islamic identity in the speech code. The other significant feature of the speech code is its use as an expression of power. Amharic gained social and political power. Arabic gained sanctity power. By modifying Amharic and using some elements of Arabic lexical and grammatical repertoire, the community empowered Amharic, the local language. They also modified the social structure that helps to accommodate ideological power.

Speech Coding in the Midbrain: Effects of Sensorineural Hearing Loss.

In response to voiced speech sounds, auditory-nerve (AN) fibres phase-lock to harmonics near best frequency (BF) and to the fundamental frequency (F0) of voiced sounds. Due to nonlinearities in the healthy ear, phase-locking in each frequency channel is dominated either by a single harmonic, for channels tuned near formants, or by F0, for channels between formants. The alternating dominance of these factors sets up a robust pattern of F0-synchronized rate across best frequency (BF). This profile of a temporally coded measure is transformed into a mean rate profile in the midbrain (inferior colliculus, IC), where neurons are sensitive to low-frequency fluctuations. In the impaired ear, the F0-synchronized rate profile is affected by several factors: Reduced synchrony capture decreases the dominance of a single harmonic near BF on the response. Elevated thresholds also reduce the effect of rate saturation, resulting in increased F0-synchrony. Wider peripheral tuning results in a wider-band envelope with reduced F0 amplitude. In general, sensorineural hearing loss reduces the contrast in AN F0-synchronized rates across BF. Computational models for AN and IC neurons illustrate how hearing loss would affect the F0-synchronized rate profiles set up in response to voiced speech sounds.

The Effect of Narrow-Band Transmission on Recognition of Paralinguistic Information From Human Vocalizations

Practically, no knowledge exists on the effects of speech coding and recognition for narrow-band transmission of speech signals within certain frequency ranges especially in relation to the recognition of paralinguistic cues in speech. We thus investigated the impact of narrow-band standard speech coders on the machine-based classification of affective vocalizations and clinical vocal recordings. In addition, we analyzed the effect of speech low-pass filtering by a set of different cut-off frequencies, either chosen as static values in the 0.5–5-kHz range or given dynamically by different upper limits from the first five speech formants (F1–F5). Speech coding and recognition were tested, first, according to short-term speaker states by using affective vocalizations as given by the Geneva Multimodal Emotion Portrayals. Second, in relation to long-term speaker traits, we tested vocal recording from clinical populations involving speech impairments as found in the Child Pathological Speech Database. We employ a large acoustic feature space derived from the Interspeech Computational Paralinguistics Challenge. Besides analysis of the sheer corruption outcome, we analyzed the potential of matched and multicondition training as opposed to miss-matched condition. In the results, first, multicondition and matched-condition training significantly increase performances as opposed to mismatched condition. Second, downgrades in classification accuracy occur, however, only at comparably severe levels of low-pass filtering. The downgrades especially appear for multi-categorical rather than for binary decisions. These can be dealt with reasonably by the alluded strategies.

Switched orthogonalization of fixed-codebook search in code-excited linear-predictive speech coder: Derivation of conditions for switching

Switched orthogonalization of fixed-codebook search in code-excited linear-predictive speech coder: Derivation of conditions for switching

"Perception of the speech code" revisited: Speech is alphabetic after all.

We revisit an article, "Perception of the Speech Code" (PSC), published in this journal 50 years ago (Liberman, Cooper, Shankweiler, & Studdert-Kennedy, 1967) and address one of its legacies concerning the status of phonetic segments, which persists in theories of speech today. In the perspective of PSC, segments both exist (in language as known) and do not exist (in articulation or the acoustic speech signal). Findings interpreted as showing that speech is not a sound alphabet, but, rather, phonemes are encoded in the signal, coupled with findings that listeners perceive articulation, led to the motor theory of speech perception, a highly controversial legacy of PSC. However, a second legacy, the paradoxical perspective on segments has been mostly unquestioned. We remove the paradox by offering an alternative supported by converging evidence that segments exist in language both as known and as used. We support the existence of segments in both language knowledge and in production by showing that phonetic segments are articulatory and dynamic and that coarticulation does not eliminate them. We show that segments leave an acoustic signature that listeners can track. This suggests that speech is well-adapted to public communication in facilitating, not creating a barrier to, exchange of language forms.

A Low Bit Rate Speech Coder Based on the Inflection Point Detection

A low bit rate speech coder based on the non-uniform sampling technique is proposed. The non-uniform sampling technique is based on the detection of inflection points (IP). A speech block is processed by the IP detector, and the detected IP pattern is compared with entries of the IP database. The address of the closest member of the database is transmitted with the energy of the speech block. In the receiver, the decoder reconstructs the speech block using the received address and the energy information of the block. As results, the coder shows fixed data rate contrary to the existing speech coders based on the non-uniform sampling. Through computer simulation, the usefulness of the proposed technique is shown. The SNR performance of the proposed method is approximately 5.27 dB with the data rate of 1.5 kbps.

Efficient statistics-based algebraic codebook search algorithms derived from RCM for an ACELP speech coder

Applied to analgebraic codebook search conducted on an algebraic code-excitedlinear-prediction (ACELP) speech coder, two improved versions of reducedcandidate mechanism (RCM), designated as Fixed-G1-RCM and Fixed-2Track-RCM, arepresented in this study for further search performance improvement. It ismainly derived from two major research findings in a piece of our prior work.The first finding is that a pulse with a high contribution in a track is morelikely to serve as the optimal pulse in the optimal vector pertaining to thetrack, and the second is that the speech quality can be well maintained at asearch accuracy above 50%. In this proposal, the trade off can be tuned betweenthe search accuracy and the search complexity so as to reach a nearlyconsistent speech quality. It is experimentally demonstrated that either Fixed-G1-RCM(N = 3), or Fixed-2Track-RCM (M = 2, N = 3, or M = 3, N = 4) can provide ahighly superior search performance relative to a global pulse replacementmethod (iteration = 2) and an iteration-freepulse replacement method.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.itc.44.4.9847

Asymmetric Windows and Their Application in Frequency Estimation

Classic windows have constant time delay and linear phase because of the symmetry and the time shift causality-imposed in the time domain. And thus, all such windows have the same spectral phase response. Removal of the symmetry constraint on a classic window can result in a variable phase response and in an alterable time delay. In essence the time delay becomes shorter will bring about a lot of benefits in speech coding. Some asymmetric windows with better magnitude response also can lead to a better recognition performance if the result is relatively insensitive to phase distortion. However, it is surprising that so little attention has been paid to the asymmetric windows in past literature; and never in past history has this issue been systematically or comprehensively studied. As a result, several methods to obtain the asymmetric windows are being presented in this paper. The asymmetric windows are displayed and compared with the classic windows, concerning both in time and frequency domains. Some new asymmetric windows with good behavior are introduced. The work in this paper makes it possible for researchers to select an asymmetric window to meet their requirements, in terms of bias due to time delay or bias due to spectral behavior. Finally, the application in a new aspect, of the asymmetric windows, is displayed. The simulation demonstrates that the improved estimation method, in which the symmetric windows are replaced by the asymmetric windows, shows a stronger capability of additive noise resistance than the traditional method.

Formant-Based Robust Voice Activity Detection

Voice activity detection (VAD) can be used to distinguish human speech from other sounds, and various applications can benefit from VAD-including speech coding and speech recognition. To accurately detect voice activity, the algorithm must take into account the characteristic features of human speech and/or background noise. In many real-life applications, noise frequently occurs in an unexpected manner, and in such situations, it is difficult to determine the characteristics of noise with sufficient accuracy. As a result, robust VAD algorithms that depend less on making correct noise estimates are desirable for real-life applications. Formants are the major spectral peaks of the human voice, and these are highly useful to distinguish vowel sounds. The characteristics of the spectral peaks are such that, these peaks are likely to survive in a signal after severe corruption by noise, and so formants are attractive features for voice activity detection under low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions. However, it is difficult to accurately extract formants from noisy signals when background noise introduces unrelated spectral peaks. Therefore, this paper proposes a simple formant-based VAD algorithm to overcome the problem of detecting formants under conditions with severe noise. The proposed method achieves a much faster processing time and outperforms standard VAD algorithms under various noise conditions. The proposed method is robust against various types of noise and produces a light computational load, so it is suitable for use in various applications.

The Multilingual Inner Discourse of Vietnamese-Hungarian Bilinguals in Solving an L3 Problem-Solution Task: An Exploratory Study

This small scale exploratory study looks at the ways in which individuals who know and use more than two languages in their daily communication employ these languages in their inner discourse when they solve a linguistic task in their third language. Research into monolingual and bilingual inner discourse has revealed that societal speech is the prime mover of inner discourse and that the languages we use in social interactions are found in our inner discourse too (Barber, 1980; Bedford, 1985; Chapman Parr & Krashen, 1986; Honeycutt, 2010; Krashen, 1983). However, we know little about how this works in the case of those who organize more than two languages in their linguistic repertoire. Ten proficient bilingual Vietnamese-Hungarian secondary school students were therefore invited to provide a story in English to a series of wordless pictures. All ten participants were learning English as a first foreign language in an academic environment where the medium of instruction was Hungarian. The study used the concurrent think-aloud method to gather data. Transcribed verbal data were processed using the standards of private speech coding and analysis. The participants employed with great flexibility the languages at their disposal; however Vietnamese, the participants’ first language, had a meagre presence in the whole of the gathered data. This seems to indicate that language reliance in non-native languages is largely guided by efficiency: languages are relied on depending on their contribution to the successful completion of the task. Insertion and language alternance were the main patterns identified of L2-L3 coupling. Although the study provides data about a small group of multiple language users, it may be informative to educators engaged in the teaching multilingual learners. Further investigations are needed to reveal how the bilingual hierarchical model of language storage and processing may be extended to map the storage and processing of three languages.

Speech coding using Best Tree Encoding (BTE) technique based on LPC and trigonometric features

Over the past several years there has been considerable attention focused on coding and enhancement of speech signals. This interest is progressed towards the development of new techniques capable of producing good quality speech at the output. Speech coding is a process of converting human speech into efficient encoded representations that can be decoded to produce a close approximation of the original signal. This paper deals with the problem of speech coding. It proposes novel approach called Best Tree Encoding (BTE) to encode the wavelet packet Best Tree Structure into a vector of four elements. This research is introducing BTE for solving another problem for speech compression and syntheses. Tree node data coefficients are encoded using LPC Filters and trigonometric features. The encoded vector consists of 4 elements from BTE analysis as well as LPC and trigonometric vector for each leaf node. The quality of the reproduced speech is evaluated for both understanding and quality. The quality of speech signal is measured on the basis of signal to noise ratio, log likelihood ratio, and spectral distortion.

Análisis acerca de las claves en las Políticas Educativas para el Empoderamiento Ciudadano

El artículo tiene por objetivo evaluar la relevancia existente, entre la comunidad científica española, del tratamiento de la información, las políticas educativas y la competencia digital con el propósito de aprovechar el potencial informativo de los nuevos productos comunicativos y educativos para la eficacia del empoderamiento ciudadano. Para ello, se ha utilizado la metodología cualitativa del análisis de contenido intensivo sobre treinta artículos científicos escritos en español, seleccionados por su relevancia e impacto científico en el período comprendido entre 2008 y 2013. Se han analizado la relevancia de los códigos del discurso y las relaciones entre las variables estudiadas obteniendo como resultado una red descriptiva causal que muestra la relación de las dinámicas que interactúan entre las variables: alfabetización digital, políticas educativas, empoderamiento ciudadano y datos abiertos (open data) con la finalidad, a modo de conclusión y discusión, de proponer sugerencias para orientar y mejorar la acción educativa.

Socio-linguistic Heterogeneity in the Writings of Selected Malaysian Indian Authors Who Write in English

This paper aims to present the linguistic heterogeneity of the Malaysian Indian community that is often thought to be homogenously “Indian” through a comparison of the socio-linguistic signifiers in four English-language Malaysian novels. The variety of real-life speech patterns and code variations in K. S. Maniam’s The Return, Rani Manicka’s The Rice Mother, Preeta Samarasan’s Evening Is the Whole Day, and Sunil Nair’s When All the Lights Are Stripped Away reveal the linguistic heterogeneity of the Malaysian Indian creative imagination. Nuanced differences in speech patterns and codes from novel to novel counterbalance stereotypical representations of the Malaysian Indian community.

AMR Steganalysis Based on the Probability of Same Pulse Position

This paper presents a method for detection of adaptive multirate (AMR) audio steganography. AMR audio codec is an audio data compression scheme optimized for speech coding, and widely used in some mobile telecommunications system. The AMR audio steganography schemes are emerging recently and they embed secret messages by modifying the nonzero pulse positions which are determined by fixed codebook search in AMR compression procedure. Those methods have high embedding capacity and good imperceptivity. We have observed that those steganography schemes will cause the probability of same pulse positions in the same track increasing. Based on this phenomenon, this paper presents a set of steganalysis features of the probability of same pulse position. The support vector machine is applied to the proposed features and used as the steganalyzer. The performance of the scheme is tested on a database containing $\sim 140$ 714 audios. Experimental results show that the correct detection rate of our proposed method is >90% when the embedding bit rate is 30% or above, and can reach above 85% for cover audios.

Hybrid speech enhancement with empirical mode decomposition and spectral subtraction for efficient speaker identification

Speech enhancement is a very important pre-processing step in various speech processing applications such as speech recognition, speaker identification, speech coding, and speech synthesis. In this paper, we focus on speech enhancement prior to speaker identification, because the degradations of the speech signals may cause difficulties in hearing, understanding, and speaker recognition. The paper presents a hybrid speech enhancement method based on empirical mode decomposition combined with spectral subtraction to improve the quality of speech signals prior to speaker identification. Simulation results show an improvement in speaker recognition rates with the proposed speech enhancement method as a pre-processing step.

Auditory Speech Perception Tests in Relation to the Coding Strategy in Cochlear Implant.

Introduction The objective of the evaluation of auditory perception of cochlear implant users is to determine how the acoustic signal is processed, leading to the recognition and understanding of sound.Objective To investigate the differences in the process of auditory speech perception in individuals with postlingual hearing loss wearing a cochlear implant, using two different speech coding strategies, and to analyze speech perception and handicap perception in relation to the strategy used.Methods This study is prospective cross-sectional cohort study of a descriptive character. We selected ten cochlear implant users that were characterized by hearing threshold by the application of speech perception tests and of the Hearing Handicap Inventory for Adults.Results There was no significant difference when comparing the variables subject age, age at acquisition of hearing loss, etiology, time of hearing deprivation, time of cochlear implant use and mean hearing threshold with the cochlear implant with the shift in speech coding strategy. There was no relationship between lack of handicap perception and improvement in speech perception in both speech coding strategies used.Conclusion There was no significant difference between the strategies evaluated and no relation was observed between them and the variables studied.

Auditory Processing in Noise: A Preschool Biomarker for Literacy.

Learning to read is a fundamental developmental milestone, and achieving reading competency has lifelong consequences. Although literacy development proceeds smoothly for many children, a subset struggle with this learning process, creating a need to identify reliable biomarkers of a child’s future literacy that could facilitate early diagnosis and access to crucial early interventions. Neural markers of reading skills have been identified in school-aged children and adults; many pertain to the precision of information processing in noise, but it is unknown whether these markers are present in pre-reading children. Here, in a series of experiments in 112 children (ages 3–14 y), we show brain–behavior relationships between the integrity of the neural coding of speech in noise and phonology. We harness these findings into a predictive model of preliteracy, revealing that a 30-min neurophysiological assessment predicts performance on multiple pre-reading tests and, one year later, predicts preschoolers’ performance across multiple domains of emergent literacy. This same neural coding model predicts literacy and diagnosis of a learning disability in school-aged children. These findings offer new insight into the biological constraints on preliteracy during early childhood, suggesting that neural processing of consonants in noise is fundamental for language and reading development. Pragmatically, these findings open doors to early identification of children at risk for language learning problems; this early identification may in turn facilitate access to early interventions that could prevent a life spent struggling to read.