To my grandfather Marcel. To my grandmother Marcelle, my parents Annie and Pascal, my sister Justine and my girlfriend Virginie. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

are summarized and evaluated in view of this critical evidence and the 2 major candidate theories--relative speed of processing and automaticity of reading--are found to be wanting. It is concluded that recent theories placing the explanatory weight on parallel processing of the irrelevant and the relevant

El Salvador, Guatemala is a, study in black and white. On the left is a collection of extreme Marxist-Leninist groups led by what one diplomat calls “a pretty faceless bunch of people.’ ’ On the right is an entrenched elite that has dominated Central America’s most populous country since a CIA-backed coup deposed the reformist government of Col. Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in 1954. Moderates of the political center. embattled but alive in E1 Salvador, have virtually disappeared in Guatemala-joining more than 30.000 victims of terror over the last tifteen vears. “The situation in Guatemala is much more serious than in EI Salvador, ” declares one Latin American diplomat. “The oligarchy is that much more reactionary. and the choices are far fewer. “ ‘Zero’: The Guatemalan oligarchs hated Jimmy Carter for cutting off U.S. military aid in 1977 to protest human-rights abuses-and the right-wingers hired marimba bands and set off firecrackers on the night Ronald Reagan was elected. They considered Reagan an ideological kinsman and believed they had a special

This thesis focuses on the problem of detecting word-level mispronunciations in nonnative speech. Conventional automatic speech recognition-based mispronunciation detection systems have the disadvantage of requiring a large amount of language-specific, annotated training data. Some systems even

pronunciation variations in a lexicon. The acoustic models are trained with native speakers ’ speech and used for recognizing the phone sequences, given the orthographic transcriptions. The experiments have examined that the agreement between automatic mispronunciation detection and human judges is over 84

Pinker, S. & Bloom, P. (1990). Natural language and natural selection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13

Botiingen Foundation, andpttt.!.,.: b % / ,.,;:,c,m B<,.ik.*, second

Using hidden Markov models (HMM's), an unobstrusive single view camera system is developed that can recognize hand gestures, namely, a subset of American Sign Language (ASL). Previous systems have concentrated on finger spelling or isolated word recognition, often using tethered electronic gloves for input. We achieve high recognition rates for full sentence ASL using only visual cues. A forty word lexicon consisting of personal pronouns, verbs, nouns, and adjectives is used to create 494 randomly constructed five word sentences that are signed by the subject to the computer. The data is separated into a 395 sentence training set and an independent 99 sentence test set. While signing, the 2D position, orientation, and eccentricity of bounding ellipses of the hands are tracked in real time with the assistance of solidly colored gloves. Simultaneous recognition and segmentation of the resultant stream of feature vectors occurs five times faster than real time on an HP 735. With a strong ...

the N-best pronunciation variants which are deemed plausible candidates for mispronunciation detection. Experiments based on the speech recordings from 21 Cantonese learners of English shows that the agreement between automatic mispronunciation detection and human judges is over 86%. Index Terms

phonological comparison between two languages to predict possible phonetic confusions that may lead to mispronunciations. We collect a corpus of speech recordings from some 21 Cantonese learners of English. We develop an automatic speech recognizer by training cross-word triphone models based on the TIMIT