Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1982. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND HUMANITIES / Bibliography: leaves 380-385. / by Donca Steriade. / Ph.D.

Thesis (M. Computer Science)--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Includes summary. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 46-48).

Title from PDF of title page. / Document formatted into pages; contains 174 pages. / Thesis (M.S.)--University of South Florida, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. / Text (Electronic thesis) in PDF format. / ABSTRACT: This study investigated the affiliation of prosody with childhood articulation disorders. The Tennessee Test of Rhythm and Intonation Patterns, T-TRIP (Koike & Asp, 1981), was used to determine if kindergartners with linguistic (i.e. phonological) speech disorders, oral-motor speech disorders, or normal speech performed differently on imitative prosody tasks. Performance was assessed perceptually with T-TRIP overall and subtest scores, and acoustically with measurements of individual prosodic variables (amplitude, duration, and fundamental frequency) on selected items from the rhythm and intonation subtests. Perceptual and acoustic data were examined for characteristic patterns of performance by individual subjects and by groups. A Kruskal-Wallis ANOVA of the perceptual scores revealed that the three groups performed differently on the T-TRIP rhythm, and intonation subtests, and on the total score. / ABSTRACT: Specifically, the oral-motor group had the lowest range of scores and was clearly separated from the other two groups. No group cut-off scores were established since the linguistic group's scores slightly overlapped the control groups' range of scores. Acoustic results generally supported the findings of earlier studies of stress and intonation. Correct responses contained a wide selection of acoustic patterns, while incorrect responses consisted of error patterns resembling those of younger children. Subjects with speech disorders demonstrated several characteristic error patterns: linguistic subjects tended to add syllables and to lexicalize items, while oral-motor subjects tended to delete syllables and to convert iambic stress into trochaic. Overall, whether T-TRIP responses were examined by perceptual or acoustic methods, the oral-motor group's imitative prosody ability was significantly different than the other groups' performance. / ABSTRACT: The clinical implications of this finding are that the T-TRIP has the potential to be used as a screening tool to identify subjects whose difficulties with imitative prosody are consistent with oral-motor speech disorders, specifically DVD. / System requirements: World Wide Web browser and PDF reader. / Mode of access: World Wide Web.

The alliterating poems written during the Alliterative Revival have mistakenly been grouped together metrically, when in fact they represent a diversity of meters. They mainly use the same phonology, however, which was also current in Chaucer and Gower's poetic dialects. In detailing the diverse meters, this study argues that the meter is simple and learnable both in the fourteenth and twenty-first centuries. Chapter 1 establishes the current intractability of Middle English metrical studies, defines the English context in which these poems were written, and challenges the traditional bifurcation of English poetry into accentual and syllable-stress. The largest group of poems shares a common meter based on long unrhymed alliterating lines that use historical final --e and asymmetrical half-lines as structuring devices. Chapter 2 adds elision to Thomas Cable's metrical system to demonstrate that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Piers Plowman are both regular, and they belong to the same metrical tradition despite the usual move by metrists to set Piers Plowman to one side. Chapter 3 compares the meter of The Destruction of Troy with the alliterative meter described in Chapter 2 and finds that Troy uses a meter that only superficially resembles the alliterative meter because the poet does not employ half-line dissimilation. Chapter 4 compares the Gawain-poet's Pearl and the bobs and wheels from Gawain to reveal that their meters belong to neither of the two traditional schools of poetry, but is instead a medieval dolnik. Chapter 5 concludes on several of the Harley Lyrics, further problematizes the binary of native and non-native meters, and hypothesizes that the medieval audience expected a diversity of metrical experiments combining these traditions in various ways.

Thesis (M.S.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of Psychology, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (doctoral)--Uppsala universitet, 1994. / Summary in English. Includes bibliographical references (p. [183]-185).

Thesis (doctoral)--Uppsala universitet, 1994. / Summary in English. Includes bibliographical references (p. [183]-185).

The research project investigated the trade-off between profit and social welfare objectives and whether metrics existed to measure the social welfare objectives set and the impact made. The study was conducted with leading brands within their respective categories and that are currently active in the South African BoP consumer market. The BoP market is widely recognised as an opportunity for business in developing markets to gain penetration of their brands and grow profits. How much of this ambition is married with social welfare objectives that aim to give back rather than just take out of the communities that they operate in? The challenge has been on what social impact to target and how to measure this. The research project was done using a quantitative research method, sampling brands that are within the top three sellers of their respective categories for LSM 1-4 consumers as measured by AMPS. This was supported by a thorough literature review to highlight the gaps that exist in the current way of interacting with BoP markets. The main finding is that profit is still the primary objective for most brands operating within this space and goals and associated social welfare metrics are still a distant third to marketing and business metrics measured within a business. The study ends with some recommendations for brand and business leaders to consider as they continue their incursions into BoP markets. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2014. / lmgibs2015 / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / Unrestricted

Le spiritualisme se définit comme un accès à la divinité à travers l’ « esprit » ou l’ « âme » et la divinité comme lecentre de la pensée cosmogonique de l’harmonie. La structure de ce spiritualisme est le point fondamental – parmi denombreux autres – qui rapproche Banville de Mallarmé. La transmission de cette structure est donc l’influence la plusremarquable que Banville exerce sur Mallarmé. Son art étant fondé sur ce principe, Banville joue là son rôle le plusimportant pour Mallarmé, qui lui accorde donc un statut divin. Les autres legs de Banville à Mallarmé convergent vers cepoint.L’évolution de Mallarmé vis-à-vis de cet héritage est parallèle à celle du statut de Banville à ses yeux et à sa propreévolution spirituelle. Nous suivons celle-ci selon trois thèmes directeurs : l’idéalisme, le lyrisme et le sacerdoce littéraire quisont étudiés dans ses oeuvres de sciences, de vers et de théâtre.À cette fin, la vie de Mallarmé est divisée en quatre périodes : de l’automne 1861 à l’été 1864 ; de l’automne 1864 auprintemps 1866 ; du printemps 1866 à août 1885 ; d’août 1885 à septembre 1898. C’est dans la « Symphonie littéraire » de1864 que l’influence de Banville devient décisive. Cette étude prend en considération les différences entre les deux poètes,en s’orientant sur la réception de Banville par Mallarmé, et l’arbitraire de ce dernier dans l’interprétation de Banville. / The spiritualism is defined as an access to the divinity through “spirit” or “soul”, and the divinity as the center of acosmogonic thought of the Harmony. The structure of this spiritualism is the fundamental point – among many others –which brings closer Banville and Mallarmé. So the transmission of this structure is the most remarkable influence exercisedby Banville on Mallarmé. Banville’s art being based on this principle, Mallarmé gives him a divine status. The otherheritages from Banville to Mallarmé lead to this point.Mallarmé’s evolution in relation to this heritage is parallel to the evolution of Banville’s status, as well as to his ownspiritual evolution. We follow the latter according to three topics: idealism, lyricism and literary priesthood, studied in hisscientific works, verse and dramatic pieces.To this end, Mallarmé’s life is divided into four periods: from autumn 1861 to summer 1864; from autumn 1864 tospring 1866; from spring 1866 to august 1885; from august 1885 to September 1898. It is in his “Symphonie littéraire” thatBanville’s influence becomes decisive. Our study takes into consideration differences between the two poets, focusing onMallarmé’s perception of Banville and on his arbitrary interpretation of the latter.

This thesis focuses on the problem of using text-to-speech (TTS) to synthesize speech with natural-sounding prosody. I propose a two-step process for approaching this problem. In the first step, I train text-based models to predict the locations of phrase boundaries and pitch accents in an utterance. Because these models use only text features, they can be used to predict the locations of prosodic events in novel utterances. In the second step, I incorporate these prosodic events into a text-to-speech pipeline in order to produce prosodically appropriate speech. I trained models for predicting phrase boundaries and pitch accents on utterances from a corpus of radio news data. I found that the strongest models used a large variety of features, including syntactic features, lexical features, word embeddings, and co-reference features. In particular, using a large variety of syntactic features improved performance on both tasks. These models also performed well when tested on a different corpus of news data. I then trained similar models on two conversational corpora: one a corpus of task-oriented dialogs and one a corpus of open-ended conversations. I again found that I could train strong models by using a wide variety of linguistic features, although performance dropped slightly in cross-corpus applications, and performance was very poor in cross-genre applications. For conversational speech, syntactic features continued to be helpful for both tasks. Additionally, word embedding features were particularly helpful in the conversational domain. Interestingly, while it is generally believed that given information (i.e., terms that have recently been referenced) is often de-accented, for all three corpora, I found that including co-reference features only slightly improved the pitch accent detection model. I then trained a TTS system on the same radio news corpus using Merlin, an open source DNN-based toolkit for TTS. As Merlin includes a linguistic feature extraction step before training, I added two additional features: one for phrase boundaries (distinguishing between sentence boundaries and mid-sentence phrase boundaries) and one for pitch accents. The locations of all breaks and accents for all test and training data were determined using the text-based prosody prediction models. I found that the pipeline using these new features produced speech that slightly outperformed the baseline on objective metrics such as mel-cepstral distortion (MCD) and was greatly preferred by listeners in a subjective listening test. Finally, I trained an end-to-end TTS system on data that included phrase boundaries. The model was trained on a corpus of read speech, with the locations of phrase boundaries predicted based on acoustic features, and tested on radio news stories, with phrase boundaries predicted using the text-based model. I found that including phrase boundaries lowered MCD between the synthesized speech and the original radio broadcast, as compared to the baseline, but the results of a listening test were inconclusive.