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This paper explores the motives of individuals to accept international assignments. It uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods to further our understanding of how important a variety of items are in the decision to work abroad. Employing a mutual dependency perspective it contrasts individual motives and organizational perspectives. Organizations significantly underestimate the importance of career, work/life balance and development considerations and overestimate the financial imperative and some family motives. The analysis showed that for individuals some of these factors significantly relate to outcome variables in terms of the perceived career capital accrued from assignments. The paper presents a more nuanced picture of influence factors on the decision to go and advocates the use of contextsensitive, multiple perspectives. Practical implications for multinational organizations are discussed.

Text-to-speech options on augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices are limited. Often, several individuals in a group setting use the same synthetic voice. This lack of customization may limit technology adoption and social integration. This paper describes our efforts to generate personalized synthesis for users with profoundly limited speech motor control. Existing voice banking and voice conversion techniques rely on recordings of clearly articulated speech from the target talker, which cannot be obtained from this population. Our VocaliD approach extracts prosodic properties from the target talker's source function and applies these features to a surrogate talker's database, generating a synthetic voice with the vocal identity of the target talker and the clarity of the surrogate talker. Promising intelligibility results suggest areas of further development for improved personalization.

PurposeThe paper seeks to explore the career attitudes, motivations and behaviours of young people in initial vocational education and training (IVET) in Europe.Design/methodology/approachThis exploratory web‐based survey was conducted during the European year for mobility. Drawing on existing research on the motivators of international careers, it explored young people's perceptions of barriers and incentives to mobility.FindingsThe study differentiates “natives” (those who did not go abroad) and “boundary crossers” (those who did). Cultural exposure, travel and a desire for adventure are key motivators. Counter‐intuitively, those who chose not to go abroad are significantly more positive about the potential for professional development but are significantly more concerned for personal safety. Some maturational trends are apparent.Research limitations/implicationsThe study is limited to a “European‐wide” perspective from a sample, which had access to the web survey. Further research could usefully explore differences in attitude and mobility behaviours within and across specific European countries.Practical implicationsFactors restricting boundary‐crossing behaviour may be rooted in aspects of psychological mobility such as perceived benefits of the experience, self‐confidence and risk aversion. This has practical implications for policy makers and career development for early career foreign didactic experiences where support for placements may need to focus more on psychological mobility, an area currently under‐researched.Originality/valueThis exploratory paper provides data to examine the mobility behaviours among young people in IVET, distinguishing between “natives” and “boundary crossers”. It presents an important attempt to more fully understand the dynamics of mobility attitudes and behaviours among young people.

This paper discusses the development and evaluation of a Speech Synthesizer for Plains Cree, an Algonquian language of North America. Synthesis is achieved using Simple4All and evaluation was performed using a modified Cluster Identification, Semantically Unpredictable Sentence, and a basic dichotomized judgment task. Resulting synthesis was not well received; however, observations regarding the process of speech synthesis evaluation in North American indigenous communities were made: chiefly, that tolerance for variation is often much lower in these communities than for majority languages. The evaluator did not recognize grammatically consistent but semantically nonsense strings as licit language. As a result, monosyllabic clusters and semantically unpredictable sentences proved not the most appropriate evaluate tools. Alternative evaluation methods are discussed.