Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1988. / Includes bibliographical references.

Based on the author's thesis, Stanford University, 1953. / International journal of American linguistics, v. 24. no. 1, pt. 3. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University, 1996. / Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Sponsor: Lenore Pogonowski. Dissertation Committee: Harold F. Abeles. Accompanying tape has Recitation of Chinese poems. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 251-257).

The teaching of singing is fraught with psychological problems not met with in the other branches of applied music. The inordinate physical and mental concepts with which the singing teacher must deal result in the necessity that the singing teacher, to be highly efficient, must be a practicing psychologist. In the writer's experience, first as student and then as teacher and observer of the work of other teachers, it has become obvious that in the minds of the majority of pupils, diction problems are so paramount that they supercede the purely vocal aspects of singing. As the language sounds are rightly but a point of departure for the building of a beautiful and expressive singing tone, it seems absolutely essential that the way must be pointed whereby language in singing can find its proper place in the pupil's development, where it can assume the position of a help rather than a hindrance in vocal achievement.

Different opinions exist about the use of phonetic alphabet symbols in teaching English pronunciation to second language learners. Some authors and researchers believe phonetic symbols can benefit students in many ways; others consider this tool hardly recommendable. However, little empirical research has been done to find out what ESL teachers think about the use of this linguistic tool. Thus, via an online survey this study sought to identify ESL teachers' attitudes towards the use of phonetic symbols in teaching ESL pronunciation. A total of 120 teachers took the survey and most of them were experienced in teaching pronunciation to adult ESL students. The analyses of qualitative data identified a contradiction between experienced teachers' opinions and what they practiced in class. On the one side, the teachers had predominantly positive attitudes towards the use of phonetic symbols, and about 80% of them agreed that it was a valuable use of class time. Despite this, many teachers (n=40) did not report using phonetic symbols in their teaching. In addition, though the teachers pointed out enabling student independent learning as the main reason to teach phonetic symbols, only three participants reported that they used phonetic symbols for this purpose. The results of the study suggest that ESL teachers' lack of training in teaching phonetic symbols to ESL students can be one of the main factors causing this contradiction.

No description available.

In this dissertation, new approaches in the design of a voice transformation (VT) system for Turkish are proposed. Objectives in this thesis are two-fold. The first objective is to develop standard speech corpora and segmentation tools for Turkish speech research. The second objective is to consider new approaches for VT. A triphone-balanced set of 2462 Turkish sentences is prepared for analysis. An audio corpus of 100 speakers, each uttering 40 sentences out of the 2462-sentence set, is used to train a speech recognition system designed for English. This system is ported to Turkish to obtain a phonetic aligner and a phoneme recognizer. The triphone-balanced sentence set and the phonetic aligner are used to develop a speech corpus for VT. A new voice transformation approach based on Mixed Excitation Linear Prediction (MELP) speech coding framework is proposed. Multi-stage vector quantization of MELP is used to obtain speaker-specific line-spectral frequency (LSF) codebooks for source and target speakers. Histograms mapping the LSF spaces of source and target speakers are used for transformation in the baseline system. The baseline system is improved by a dynamic programming approach to estimate the target LSFs. As a second approach to the VT problem, quantizing the LSFs using k-means clustering algorithm is applied with dimension reduction of LSFs using principle component analysis. This approach provides speaker-specific codebooks out of the speech corpus instead of using MELP&#039 / s pre-trained LSF codebook. Evaluations show that both dimension reduction and dynamic programming improve the transformation performance.

No description available.

No description available.

Este trabalho apresenta um estudo sobre a utilização de dispositivos adaptativos para realizar tradução texto-voz. O foco do trabalho é a criação de um método para a tradução grafema-fonema para a língua portuguesa baseado em autômatos adaptativos e seu uso em um software de tradução texto-voz. O método apresentado busca mimetizar o comportamento humano no tratamento de regras de tonicidade, separação de sílabas e as influências que as sílabas exercem sobre suas vizinhas. Essa característica torna o método facilmente utilizável para outras variações da língua portuguesa, considerando que essas características são invariantes em relação à localidade e a época da variedade escolhida. A variação contemporânea da língua falada na cidade de São Paulo foi escolhida como alvo de análise e testes neste trabalho. Para essa variação, o modelo apresenta resultados satisfatórios superando 95% de acerto na tradução grafema-fonema de palavras, chegando a 90% de acerto levando em consideração a resolução de dúvidas geradas por palavras que podem possuir duas representações sonoras e gerando uma saída sonora inteligível aos nativos da língua por meio da síntese por concatenação baseada em sílabas. Como resultado do trabalho, além do modelo para tradução grafema-fonema de palavras baseado em autômatos adaptativos, foi criado um método para escolha da representação fonética correta em caso de ambigüidade e foram criados dois softwares, um para simulação de autômatos adaptativos e outro para a tradução grafema-fonema de palavras utilizando o modelo de tradução criado e o método de escolha da representação correta. Esse último software foi unificado ao sintetizador desenvolvido por Koike et al. (2007) para a criação de um tradutor texto-voz para a língua portuguesa. O trabalho mostra a viabilidade da utilização de autômatos adaptativos como base ou como um elemento auxiliar para o processo de tradução texto-voz na língua portuguesa. / This work presents a study on the use of adaptive devices for text-to-speech translation. The work focuses on the development of a grapheme-phoneme translation method for Portuguese based on Adaptive Automata and the use of this method in a text-to-speech translation software. The presented method resembles human behavior when handling syllable separation rules, syllable stress definition and influences syllables have on each other. This feature makes the method easy to use with different variations of Portuguese, since these characteristics are invariants of the language. Portuguese spoken nowadays in São Paulo, Brazil has been chosen as the target for analysis and tests in this work. The method has good results for such variation of Portuguese, reaching 95% accuracy rate for grapheme-phoneme translation, clearing the 90% mark after resolution of ambiguous cases in which different representations are accepted for a grapheme and generating phonetic output intelligible for native speakers based on concatenation synthesis using syllables as concatenation units. As final results of this work, a model is presented for grapheme-phoneme translation for Portuguese words based on Adaptive Automata, a methodology to choose the correct phonetic representation for the grapheme in ambiguous cases, a software for Adaptive Automata simulation and a software for grapheme-phoneme translation of texts using both the model of translation and methodology for disambiguation. The latter software was unified with the speech synthesizer developed by Koike et al. (2007) to create a text-to-speech translator for Portuguese. This work evidences the feasibility of text-to-speech translation for Portuguese using Adaptive Automata as the main instrument for such task.