Making demonstrably reliable forensic voice comparison a practical everyday reality in Australia. To assist Australian law-enforcement agencies and courts in the process of the conviction of the guilty and the exoneration of the innocent, this project will develop and test a practical and demonstrably reliable forensic voice comparison system for use with Australian voices. This will allow forensic scientists to produce reliable strength of evidence statements for presentation in court using the ....Making demonstrably reliable forensic voice comparison a practical everyday reality in Australia. To assist Australian law-enforcement agencies and courts in the process of the conviction of the guilty and the exoneration of the innocent, this project will develop and test a practical and demonstrably reliable forensic voice comparison system for use with Australian voices. This will allow forensic scientists to produce reliable strength of evidence statements for presentation in court using the same evaluative framework as used with DNA. In addition, application of the system during criminal investigations may lead to the refocussing of investigations on other suspects, or may help leverage guilty pleas, thus saving substantial time and money.Read moreRead less
Using written language to probe speech recognition models. Speech recognition models fall into two principal classes, with fundamentally different processing architectures. Feedback models (e.g. TRACE, McClelland & Elman, 1986) allow lexical knowledge to exert top-down control over phonemic analysis. Feedforward models (e.g. Merge, Norris, McQueen & Cutler, 2000) assume that information flow is entirely bottom-up. Our project adopts an innovative approach to testing between these model classe ....Using written language to probe speech recognition models. Speech recognition models fall into two principal classes, with fundamentally different processing architectures. Feedback models (e.g. TRACE, McClelland & Elman, 1986) allow lexical knowledge to exert top-down control over phonemic analysis. Feedforward models (e.g. Merge, Norris, McQueen & Cutler, 2000) assume that information flow is entirely bottom-up. Our project adopts an innovative approach to testing between these model classes, by examining the influence of written-word knowledge on speech perception. To distinguish the models, contrasts must test different processing levels and examine strategy effects. TRACE favors broad effects with limited strategic influence; Merge favors lexical effects that are necessarily sensitive to strategic factorsRead moreRead less
How Strict is the Mother Tongue? Using Dialects to Probe Early Speech Perception and Word Recognition. This project will 1)advance knowledge of toddler word representations and their developmental precursors; 2) contribute to theories of phonological vs phonetic properties of spoken language; 3) explain how experience with the ambient language shapes children's phonological and lexical development. Moreover, the findings will 4) offer crucial new insights into sources of developmental disorders ....How Strict is the Mother Tongue? Using Dialects to Probe Early Speech Perception and Word Recognition. This project will 1)advance knowledge of toddler word representations and their developmental precursors; 2) contribute to theories of phonological vs phonetic properties of spoken language; 3) explain how experience with the ambient language shapes children's phonological and lexical development. Moreover, the findings will 4) offer crucial new insights into sources of developmental disorders (language delay, dyslexia) leading to improved early diagnosis and treatment; 5) bear on issues of second language learning; and by understanding the process by which young learners handle dialect variability, 6) provide insights into how automatic speech recognition systems can be made more robust to dialectal and foreign accent differences.
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Development of second language phonetic and phonological categories. The majority of the world's population speaks two or more languages, yet we know little about how multiple languages are accommodated within a single speaker. Why do children appear to learn a second language 'like a native' but adults invariably develop a clearly perceptible foreign accent? This project investigates a little-known fact - adult second language speakers also 'hear' with a foreign accent. As Australia becomes inc ....Development of second language phonetic and phonological categories. The majority of the world's population speaks two or more languages, yet we know little about how multiple languages are accommodated within a single speaker. Why do children appear to learn a second language 'like a native' but adults invariably develop a clearly perceptible foreign accent? This project investigates a little-known fact - adult second language speakers also 'hear' with a foreign accent. As Australia becomes increasingly multilingual increasing our understanding of the human capacity for language learning would strengthen Australia's social and economic fabric by leading to improved educational practices, work prospects for migrants and, most importantly, understanding between cultures.Read moreRead less
Building a Talking Head via Dynamic & 3D-Static, and Age- & Ethnically-Varied Databases: Perceptibility and Acceptability. This project will provide cutting edge realistic, perceptible talking head animation. Based on rich 3D face motion and static face databases, it will allow the study of the facial structure of specific groups of people, and the creation of a lasting cultural heritage of faces. Information in these databases will be useful for research in high-quality 3D face reconstruction ....Building a Talking Head via Dynamic & 3D-Static, and Age- & Ethnically-Varied Databases: Perceptibility and Acceptability. This project will provide cutting edge realistic, perceptible talking head animation. Based on rich 3D face motion and static face databases, it will allow the study of the facial structure of specific groups of people, and the creation of a lasting cultural heritage of faces. Information in these databases will be useful for research in high-quality 3D face reconstruction, with applications as wide as multimodal Biometric Identification, finding lost children, and security systems. The novel methods in this project will also advance auditory-visual speech and emotion research with particular commercial applications in telecommunications, human-machine interfaces, foreign language teaching, humanoid development, animation, and film.Read moreRead less
Unveiling the mystery of tone perception: How does native language prosody affect adults' perception of foreign tones? This project provides new knowledge about how humans perceive non-native lexical tone categories. The results of this large-scale cross-language study will indicate how native languages constrain human perception of non-native speech (consonants, vowels, intonation). These data will greatly facilitate the research in second language acquisition and teaching, speech perception mo ....Unveiling the mystery of tone perception: How does native language prosody affect adults' perception of foreign tones? This project provides new knowledge about how humans perceive non-native lexical tone categories. The results of this large-scale cross-language study will indicate how native languages constrain human perception of non-native speech (consonants, vowels, intonation). These data will greatly facilitate the research in second language acquisition and teaching, speech perception modeling including automatic speech recognition with tone languages, human speech processing. The findings will also be useful to clinical speech and hearing research for speech and hearing impaired persons, and commercial applications in foreign language teaching, and computer assisted language learning for language learners.Read moreRead less
Tonal language development in Mandarin and Cantonese-speaking children with cochlear implants. Cochlear implantation in children is expanding in countries where tonal languages are spoken, despite limited evidence of the effectiveness of implant use in these settings. This project will examine the impact of implant use on children's perception of tone, their production of speech and assesses how this affects functional communication.
Illuminating the Language-specific and Physiological Motor-control Influences on Children's Production of Lexical Stress. Great progress has been made in understanding the production of individual speech sounds but much less is known about the production of prosody. Lexical stress is a type of prosody that reflects the contrast between strong and weak syllables within single words. The ability to achieve this contrastivity shows a protracted developmental trajectory in healthy children and is at ....Illuminating the Language-specific and Physiological Motor-control Influences on Children's Production of Lexical Stress. Great progress has been made in understanding the production of individual speech sounds but much less is known about the production of prosody. Lexical stress is a type of prosody that reflects the contrast between strong and weak syllables within single words. The ability to achieve this contrastivity shows a protracted developmental trajectory in healthy children and is atypical in some children with autism. How these developmental influences relate to language-specific versus physiological motor-control factors is unknown. This project will address this critical research problem via innovative acoustic investigations. Outcomes will trigger the next generation of speech production models with potential for impact in areas like speech pathology.Read moreRead less
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE150101053
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$364,536.00
Summary
Cracking the code of successful language learning. Mastery of a second language generates economic advantages, especially in English-speaking nations with large immigrant populations, such as Australia. It is not clear why some second-language learners flourish while others struggle in the same educational setting. Successful learners must possess attributes that when combined with the features of the learning situation result in positive learning outcomes, whereas unsuccessful learners are like ....Cracking the code of successful language learning. Mastery of a second language generates economic advantages, especially in English-speaking nations with large immigrant populations, such as Australia. It is not clear why some second-language learners flourish while others struggle in the same educational setting. Successful learners must possess attributes that when combined with the features of the learning situation result in positive learning outcomes, whereas unsuccessful learners are likely mismatched to their training method. In a series of artificial language learning experiments, this project aims to identify the combination of factors that matter most in successful language learning. Ultimately it may be possible to tailor training proactively to maximise learning outcomes.Read moreRead less
Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment And Facilities - Grant ID: LE100100211
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$650,000.00
Summary
The Big Australian Speech Corpus: An audio-visual speech corpus of Australian English. Contemporary speech science and technology are driven by the availability of large speech corpora. While audio databases exist for languages spoken in America, Europe and Japan, there is currently no large auditory-visual database of spoken language, and certainly not one for Australian English. Here we will establish the Big Australian Speech Corpus, which will support a speech science research and developmen ....The Big Australian Speech Corpus: An audio-visual speech corpus of Australian English. Contemporary speech science and technology are driven by the availability of large speech corpora. While audio databases exist for languages spoken in America, Europe and Japan, there is currently no large auditory-visual database of spoken language, and certainly not one for Australian English. Here we will establish the Big Australian Speech Corpus, which will support a speech science research and development using Australian English and facilitate the development of Australian speech technology applications from automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis used in taxi and other ordering services, to hearing prostheses and talking head aids for learning-impaired children, and a range of security and forensic applications.Read moreRead less