För att idag kunna känna en delaktighet i samhället behöver varje människa kunna samspela. Detta samspel bygger på kommunikation med varandra. Det finns personer som har svårt för att kommunicera då det kan finnas ett språk och/eller en kommunikationsbarriär. För att komma över den här barriären kan man använda sig av stödtecken. I Sveriges förskolor arbetas det ibland med tecken som hjälpmedel. Denna teckenanvändning kallas för TAKK (Tecken som Alternativ och Kompletterande Kommunikation). Vårt syfte med rapporten var att ta reda på hur förskolor arbetar med tecken. Hur ofta de används, vad pedagogerna ser för utmaningar och möjligheter med det och om de anser att det kan vara till stöd för barnen i deras språk- och kommunikationsutveckling och i så fall på vilket sätt. För att få fram ett resultat utifrån detta syfte intervjuades sex stycken pedagoger i norra delen av Sverige. När vi analyserade intervjuerna gjorde vi en transkribering av vårt insamlade material. Därefter använde vi oss av fenomenografisk analysmetod. Detta kommer vi beskriva mer ingående i metodavsnittet. I resultatet framgick det att tecken endast användes i enstaka situationer men att pedagogerna skulle vilja arbeta mer med det. Pedagogerna såg många möjligheter med att använda TAKK och de menade bland annat att det kunde gynna barnens språkutveckling på olika sätt. Det fanns även utmaningar med TAKK som till exempel kunde vara att pedagogerna inte hade någon eller otillräckligt med utbildning inom TAKK vilket vi tolkar kan vara en nackdel. I rapporten kommer TAKK, tecken och tecken som stöd användas som synonymer.

Ce travail de thèse porte sur un nouveau paradigme pour la synthèse de la parole à partir du texte, à savoir la synthèse incrémentale. L'objectif est de délivrer la parole de synthèse au fur et à mesure de la saisie du texte par l'utilisateur, contrairement aux systèmes classiques pour lesquels la synthèse est déclenchée après la saisie d'une ou plusieurs phrases. L'application principale visée est l'aide aux personnes présentant un trouble sévère de la communication orale, et communiquant principalement à l'aide d'un synthétiseur vocal. Un synthétiseur vocal incrémental permettrait de fluidifier une conversation en limitant le temps que passe l'interlocuteur à attendre la fin de la saisie de la phrase à synthétiser. Un des défi que pose ce paradigme est la synthèse d'un mot ou d'un groupe de mot avec une qualité segmentale et prosodique acceptable alors que la phrase qui le contient n'est que partiellement connue au moment de la synthèse. Pour ce faire, nous proposons différentes adaptations des deux principaux modules d'un système de synthèse de parole à partir du texte : le module de traitement automatique de la langue naturelle (TAL) et le module de synthèse sonore. Pour le TAL en synthèse incrémentale, nous nous sommes intéressé à l'analyse morpho-syntaxique, qui est une étape décisive pour la phonétisation et la détermination de la prosodie cible. Nous décrivons un algorithme d'analyse morpho-syntaxique dit "à latence adaptative". Ce dernier estime en ligne si une classe lexicale (estimée à l'aide d'un analyseur morpho-syntaxique standard basé sur l'approche n-gram), est susceptible de changer après l'ajout par l'utilisateur d'un ou plusieurs mots. Si la classe est jugée instable, alors la synthèse sonore est retardée, dans le cas contraire, elle peut s'effectuer sans risque a priori de dégrader de la qualité segmentale et suprasegmentale. Cet algorithme exploite une ensemble d'arbre de décisions binaires dont les paramètres sont estimés par apprentissage automatique sur un large corpus de texte. Cette méthode nous permet de réaliser un étiquetage morpho-syntaxique en contexte incrémental avec une précision de 92,5% pour une latence moyenne de 1,4 mots. Pour la synthèse sonore, nous nous plaçons dans le cadre de la synthèse paramétrique statistique, basée sur les modèles de Markov cachés (Hidden Markov Models, HMM). Nous proposons une méthode de construction de la voix de synthèse (estimation des paramètres de modèles HMM) prenant en compte une éventuelle incertitude sur la valeur de certains descripteurs contextuels qui ne peuvent pas être calculés en synthèse incrémentale (c'est-à-dire ceux qui portent sur les mots qui ne sont pas encore saisis au moment de la synthèse).Nous comparons la méthode proposée à deux autres stratégies décrites dans la littérature. Les résultats des évaluations objectives et perceptives montrent l’intérêt de la méthode proposée pour la langue française. Enfin, nous décrivons un prototype complet qui combine les deux méthodes proposées pour le TAL et la synthèse par HMM incrémentale. Une évaluation perceptive de la pertinence et de la qualité des groupes de mots synthétisés au fur et à mesure de la saisie montre que notre système réalise un compromis acceptable entre réactivité (minimisation du temps entre la saisie d'un mot et sa synthèse) et qualité (segmentale et prosodique) de la parole de synthèse. / In this thesis, we investigate a new paradigm for text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) allowing to deliver synthetic speech while the text is being inputted : incremental text-to-speech synthesis. Contrary to conventional TTS systems, that trigger the synthesis after a whole sentence has been typed down, incremental TTS devices deliver speech in a ``piece-meal'' fashion (i.e. word after word) while aiming at preserving the speech quality achievable by conventional TTS systems.By reducing the waiting time between two speech outputs while maintaining a good speech quality, such a system should improve the quality of the interaction for speech-impaired people using TTS devices to express themselves.The main challenge brought by incremental TTS is the synthesis of a word, or of a group of words, with the same segmental and supra-segmental quality as conventional TTS, but without knowing the end of the sentence to be synthesized. In this thesis, we propose to adapt the two main modules (natural language processing and speech synthesis) of a TTS system to the incremental paradigm.For the natural language processing module, we focused on part-of-speech tagging, which is a key step for phonetization and prosody generation. We propose an ``adaptive latency algorithm'' for part-of-speech tagging, that estimates if the inferred part-of-speech for a given word (based on the n-gram approach) is likely to change when adding one or several words. If the Part-of-speech is considered as likely to change, the synthesis of the word is delayed. In the other case, the word may be synthesized without risking to alter the segmental or supra-segmental quality of the synthetic speech. The proposed method is based on a set of binary decision trees trained over a large corpus of text. We achieve 92.5% precision for the incremental part-of-speech tagging task and a mean delay of 1.4 words.For the speech synthesis module, in the context of HMM-based speech synthesis, we propose a training method that takes into account the uncertainty about contextual features that cannot be computed at synthesis time (namely, contextual features related to the following words). We compare the proposed method to other strategies (baselines) described in the literature. Objective and subjective evaluation show that the proposed method outperforms the baselines for French.Finally, we describe a prototype developed during this thesis implementing the proposed solution for incremental part-of-speech tagging and speech synthesis. A perceptive evaluation of the word grouping derived from the proposed adaptive latency algorithm as well as the segmental quality of the synthetic speech tends to show that our system reaches a good trade-off between reactivity (minimizing the waiting time between the input and the synthesis of a word) and speech quality (both at segmental and supra-segmental levels).

Stora delar av världen är idag uppbyggda av skriftliga kulturer. För att kunna använda teknik och delta i dessa kulturer behöver människor behärska läskonst. I denna studie undersöks hur människor som har nedsatt läsförmåga navigerar sig kring skrift i skriftliga kulturer med hjälp av text-to-speech program (TTS-program). Studiens teoretiska disposition är skapad genom Ongs teorier om primärt skriftliga och talspråkliga kulturer samt McLuhans mediumteori för att kunna förstå skrift som för det första, en teknologi vilket möjliggör dagens teknik och för det andra, förstå vad ett medium innebär. Med etnografisk ansats intervjuades fyra människor med nedsatt läsförmåga om deras erfarenheter och användning av mediet TTS-program vid läsning. Syftet med detta sätt att undersöka mediet TTS-program va att förstå deltagarnas sätt att använda det under läsning genom deras egna ord. Resultatet i denna studie visar att när deltagarna läser med TTS-program används det i kombination med en mängd andra medium, metoder och processer vilka tillsammans skapar ett slags personligt nätverk vilket deltagarna konstruerat för att läsa på ett sätt som passar dem.

No description available.

Traditional and commercial speech synthesizers are incapable of synthesizing speech with proper emotion or prosody. Conveying prosody in artificially synthesized speech is difficult because of extreme variability in human speech. An arbitrary natural language sentence can have different meanings, depending upon the speaker, speaking style, context, and many other factors. Most concatenated speech synthesizers use phonemes, which are phonetic units defined by the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The 50 phonemes in English are standardized and unique units of sound, but not expression. An earlier work proposed the analogy between speech and music ? ?speech is music, music is speech.? The speech data obtained from the master practitioners, who are trained in kinesensic voice, is marked on a five level intonation scale, which is similar to the music scale. From this speech data, 1324 unique expressive units, called expressemes®, are identified. The expressemes consist of melody and rhythm, which, in digital signal processing, is analogous to pitch, duration and energy of the signal. The expressemes have less acoustic and phonetic variability than phonemes, so they better convey the prosody. The goal is to develop a speech synthesizer which exploits the prosodic content of expressemes in order to synthesize expressive speech, with a small speech database. To create a reasonably small database that captures multiple expressions is a challenge because there may not be a complete set of speech segments available to create an emotion. Methods are suggested whereby acoustic mathematical modeling is used to create missing prosodic speech segments from the base prosody unit. New concatenatedormant hybrid speech synthesizer architecture is developed for this purpose. A pitch-synchronous time-varying frequency-warped wavelet transform based prosody manipulation algorithm is developed for transformation between prosodies. A time-varying frequency-warping transform is developed to smoothly concatenate the temporal and spectral parameters of adjacent expressemes to create intelligible speech. Additionally, issues specific to expressive speech synthesis using expressemes are resolved for example, Ergodic Hidden Markov Model based expresseme segmentation, model creation for F0 and segment duration, and target and join cost calculation. The performance of the hybrid synthesizer is measured against a commercially available synthesizer using objective and perceptual evaluations. Subjects consistently rated the hybrid synthesizer better in five different perceptual tests. 70% of speakers rated the hybrid synthesis as more expressive, and 72% preferred it over the commercial synthesizer. The hybrid synthesizer also got a comparable mean opinion score.

No description available.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 18-21, 2004 / Town & Country Resort, San Diego, California / The Precision Fires Rocket and Missile Systems (PFRMS) Program Office continually undertakes Stockpile Reliability Testing (SRP) to ensure the validity of the accumulated weapons and increase the she lf life of these weapon systems. MLRS is a legacy weapon system that has been undergoing SRP testing for over 20 years. The PFRMS Program Office has a need for a miniature Tactical Telemetry System that will monitor the fuze performance of the MLRS Rocket during SRP testing. This paper will address a technical approach of how a small Tactical Telemetry System could be built to meet this requirement. The Tactical Telemetry system proposed in this paper will monitor fuze functions, operate across the wide environmental spectrum of the SRP tests, and physically fit in the nose area without altering the overall tactical rocket appearance or operation.

Previous literature has demonstrated that supplemental magnesium may have a prophylactic effect on noise induced hearing loss (NIHL). The purpose of this study was to replicate the findings of a previous investigation concerning the beneficial effects of supplemental magnesium on TTS in humans. Forty participants with normal hearing were divided into two groups, experimental and control. The experimental group received a single, 150 mg dose of supplemental magnesium and the control group received a placebo. After an hour in a quiet environment, all participants were exposed to a narrowband noise centered at 2000 Hz and presented at 105 dB SPL. Audiometric thresholds were measured for the frequency range 250 Hz - 8000 Hz prior to the noise exposure, and then immediately, 30 minutes, and 60 minutes post-noise exposure. Both groups experienced TTS at and above 2000 Hz. The largest TTS was observed immediately following the noise exposure in both groups. There was no significant difference in TTS between the experimental group and the control group. It was concluded that a single dose of 150 mg of supplemental magnesium was not effective in reducing or preventing TTS.

Previous studies have shown that supplemental magnesium administered prior to exposure to noise has an alleviating effect on temporary threshold shift (TTS). These studies have only used audiometric thresholds to demonstrate changes in the auditory system. However, to help determine the effects on outer hair cells (OHCs), a more sensitive measure should be used. The purpose of this study was to determine if supplemental magnesium administration prior to noise exposure has a beneficial effect on acoustic overexposure using a double-blind research design. This was determined by measuring distortion product otoacoustic emissions (DPOAEs) to determine any changes in cochlear OHC function. DPOAE amplitude and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) measurements were analyzed for two groups of twenty participants (an experimental group and a control group). The experimental group received 150 mg of magnesium gluconate one hour prior to noise exposure. The control group received a placebo pill that was identical in appearance to the magnesium pill. Following noise exposure, the greatest changes in DPOAE amplitude and SNR occurred for the frequencies that were one-half to one octave above the frequency of the stimuli used. The greatest changes in DPOAE measurements were present immediately post TTS-inducing stimulus, with only slight changes present after 30 minutes and no difference between 30 minutes and 60 minutes post-exposure. These results were the same for both groups. It was concluded that this dosage of supplemental magnesium had no apparent protective effect on DPOAEs following intense noise exposure.

Elections are one of the most fundamental activities of a democratic society. As is the case in any other aspect of life, developments in technology have resulted changes in the voting procedure from using the traditional paper-based voting to voting by use of electronic means, or e-voting. E-voting involves using different forms of electronic means like / voting machines, voting via the Internet, telephone, SMS and digital interactive television. This thesis concerns voting by telephone, or televoting, it starts by giving a brief overview and evaluation of various models and technologies that are implemented within such systems. The aspects of televoting that have been investigated are technologies that provide a voice interface to the voter and conduct the voting process, namely the Election Markup Language (EML), Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Speech (TTS).