In this paper we examine whether the recognition of a spoken noun is affected by the gender marking-masculine or feminine-that is carried by a preceding word. In the first of two experiments, the gating paradigm was used to study the access of French nouns that were preceded by an appropriate gender marking, carried by an article, or preceded by no gender marking. In the second experiment, subjects were asked to make a lexical decision on the same material. A very strong facilitatory effect was found in both cases. The origin of the gender-marking effect is discussed, as well as the level of processing involved-lexical or syntactic.

This paper describes a low power implementation of the Bluetooth Subband CODEC (SBC) for high-fidelity wireless audio. The design uses a configurable Weighted Overlap-Add (WOLA) filterbank coprocessor to implement the analysis and synthesis filterbanks. A new method to convert the two-times over-sampled, complex WOLA subband signals to equivalent critically sampled, real-valued SBC subband signals is presented. The WOLA coprocessor allows for an efficient parallel implementation of the filterbank and quantization portions of the SBC algorithm. Details of the overall system design are also presented, including measurements of power consumption and resource requirements. The final real-time, fixed-point implementation is compared to an off-line floating-point reference and found to produce no audible difference in decoded signal quality.

The ETSl AMR-2 VAD is rigorously evaluated in clean and noisy conditions. The VAD is then simplified and optimized for porting to an ultra low-resource DSP system using a fast oversampled D F r filterhank. The parameters of the low-resource VAD are optimized using two speakers and 6 types of noise at SNRs from -10 to 20 dB. The VAD is then tested by employing sentences from two other speakers and 12 different types of noise. Results show that the low-resource VAD offers a performance comparable to that of the ETSl VAD in both clean and noisy conditions. When deployed on a custom DSP running at a clock speed of 1.28 MHz and consuming less than 1 milliwatt of power, the low-resource VAD uses less than 30% of the available system resources.

Language tools that help people with their writing are now usually included in today's word processors. Although these various tools provide increasing support to native speakers of a language, they are much less useful to non-native speakers who are writing in their second language (e.g. French speakers writing in English). Real errors may go undetected and potential errors or non-errors that are flagged by the system may be taken to be genuine errors by the non-native speaker. In this paper, we present the prototype of an English writing tool which is aimed at helping speakers of French write in English. We first discuss the kind of problems non-native speakers have when writing in a second language. We then explain how we collected a corpus of errors which we used to build a typology of errors needed in the various stages of the project. This is followed by an overview of the prototype which contains a number of writing aids (dictionaries, on-line grammar helps, verb conjugator, etc.) and two checking tools : a problem word highlighter which lists all the potentially difficult words that cannot be dealt with correctly by the system (false friends, confusions, etc.) and a grammar checker which detects and corrects morphological and syntactic errors. We describe in detail the automata formalism we use to extract linguistic information, test syntactic environments and detect and correct errors. Finally, we present a first evaluation of the correction capacity of our grammar checker as compared to that of commercially available systems. * The research presented here was part of a three-year project funded by the Swiss Committee for the Encouragement of Scientific Research (CERS\KWF 2054.2). The authors would like to thank Jacqueline Gremaud-Brandhorst, Catherine Liechti and Alain Matthey for their help during the project.

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