H Timothy Bunnell, PhD

Center Director/Principal Research Scientist

Nemours Children's Hospital, Delaware 1600 Rockland Road Wilmington, DE 19803

Biography

Dr. Bunnell received his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from The Pennsylvania State University in 1983, concentrating in human speech perception and the acoustic properties of speech (acoustic phonetics). From 1983 to 1989, he worked as a Research Scientist in the Sensory Communication Research Laboratory (later Center for Auditory and Speech Sciences) at Gallaudet University conducting research on the application of digital speech processing techniques to hearing enhancement, primarily for acoustic hearing aid users. In 1989 he became the director of the Speech Processing Laboratory at the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children where his research interests expanded to include text to speech synthesis and speech recognition. Dr. Bunnell is now the director of the Nemours Center for Pediatric Auditory and Speech Sciences (CPASS) and head of the Speech Research Laboratory within the CPASS. Since 2000, he has also served as director of the Biomedical Research Informatics Center (BRIC). BRIC maintains computing resources for Nemours Biomedical Research, and provides expertise in applications development, biostatistics, data mining, and numerical analysis. Dr Bunnell is presently the Nemours Institutional Co-PI (with Dr. Anne Kazak) for PEDSnet, and Institutional PI for the NIH-funded CTR Consortium N3C project as well as the NIH-funded RECOVER EHR project.

Medical/Dental School

  • BS - University of Maryland, Psychology, 1975
  • M.S. - The Pennsylvania State University, Psychology, 1978
  • Ph.D. - The Pennsylvania State University, Psychology, 1983

  • A large-scale comparison of two voice synthesis techniques on intelligibility, naturalness, preferences, and attitudes toward voices banked by individuals with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis; Augmentative and Alternative Communication; (2023).

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  • Voice banking to support individuals who use speech-generating devices: development and evaluation of Singaporean-accented English synthetic voices and a Singapore Colloquial English recording inventory; Augmentative and Alternative Communication; (2023).

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  • Comprehension by Caregivers and Adolescents of Clinical Trial Information Delivered via Multimedia Video Versus Conventional Practice: Nonrandomized Controlled Trial; JMIR Pediatrics and Parenting; (2023).

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  • Comprehension by Caregivers and Adolescents of Clinical Trial Information Delivered via Multimedia Video Versus Conventional Practice: Nonrandomized Controlled Trial (Preprint); Unknown Source; (2022).

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  • Unsupervised Training of a DNN-Based Formant Tracker; Interspeech 2021; (2021).

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  • Assessment of 135 794 Pediatric Patients Tested for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 Across the United States.; JAMA pediatrics; (2020).

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  • Privacy-protecting multivariable-adjusted distributed regression analysis for multi-center pediatric study; Pediatric Research; (2020).

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  • Effects of age, sex, race/ethnicity, and allergy status in obesity-related pediatric asthma; Pediatric Pulmonology; (2019).

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  • Being overweight or obese and the development of asthma; Pediatrics; (2018).

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  • The use of machine learning and phonetic endophenotypes to discover genetic variants associated with speech sound disorder; Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH; (2018).

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  • A cognitive approach for design of a multimedia informed consent video and website in pediatric research; Journal of Biomedical Informatics; (2017).

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  • Prediction of speech delay from acoustic measurements; Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH; (2017).

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  • The model talker project: A web-based voice banking pipeline for als/mnd patients; Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH; (2017).

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  • Use of mobile devices and the internet for multimedia informed consent delivery and data entry in a pediatric asthma trial: Study design and rationale; Contemporary Clinical Trials; (2015).

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  • Automating an objective measure of pediatric speech intelligibility; Unknown Source; (2014).

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  • Towards personalized speech synthesis for augmentative and alternative communication; Unknown Source; (2014).

  • Automatic speech feature classification for children with cochlear implants; Unknown Source; (2014).

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  • Relationship between articulation and mispronunciation detection in children with speech delay: Perception of unfamiliar speech vs. their own speech; Unknown Source; (2013).

  • Optimizations and fitting procedures for the Liljencrants-Fant model for statistical parametric speech synthesis; Unknown Source; (2013).

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  • Using automatic alignment to analyze endangered language data: Testing the viability of untrained alignment; Unknown Source; (2013).

  • Unsupervised vocal-tract length estimation through model-based acoustic-to- Articulatory inversion; Unknown Source; (2013).

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  • Emotion identification for evaluation of synthesized emotional speech; Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Speech Prosody, SP 2012; (2012).

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  • Articulatory features for expressive speech synthesis; Unknown Source; (2012).

  • Assessing agreement level between forced alignment models with data from endangered language documentation corpora; Unknown Source; (2012).

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  • Perception of synthetic speech in adult users of cochlear implants; Unknown Source; (2012).

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  • Palatalization in Romanian-Acoustic properties and perception; Unknown Source; (2012).

  • Speech production-perception relationships in children with speech delay; Unknown Source; (2012).

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  • Text-to-speech intelligibility across speech rates; Unknown Source; (2012).

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  • Utterance verification for automating the Hearing in Noise Test (HINT); Unknown Source; (2011).

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  • Advances in computer speech synthesis and implications for assistive technology; Unknown Source; (2010).

  • VocaliD: Personalizing text-to-speech synthesis for individuals with severe speech impairment; Unknown Source; (2009).

  • Efficacy of Chest Physiotherapy in Pediatric Patients with Acute Asthma Exacerbations; Unknown Source; (2009).

  • Perception of english compound vs. phrasal stress: Natural vs. synthetic speech; Unknown Source; (2009).

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  • Academic and clinical training in cleft palate for speech-language pathologists; Unknown Source; (2008).

  • Schwa variants in American english; Unknown Source; (2008).

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  • Editors' report for volume 50; Unknown Source; (2007).

  • Speech perception in children with speech sound disorder; Unknown Source; (2007).

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  • Editors' report for volume 49; Unknown Source; (2006).

  • Acoustic characterization of children with speech delay; Unknown Source; (2006).

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  • Automatic personal synthetic voice construction; Unknown Source; (2005).

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  • A system for creating personalized synthetic voices; Unknown Source; (2005).

  • Spectral Moment vs. Bark cepstral analysis of childrenís word-initial voiceless stops; 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, ICSLP 2004; (2004).

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  • STAR: Articulation training for young children; 6th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, ICSLP 2000; (2000).

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  • Perceptual evaluations of spectral and temporal modifications of deaf speech; Unknown Source; (1998).

  • Nemours database of dysarthric speech; Unknown Source; (1996).

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  • Phonetics of intervocalic consonant perception: Retrospect and prospect; Phonetica; (1995).

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  • [465] Determinants of intelligibility in dysarthric speech; Unknown Source; (1991).

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  • On enhancement of spectral contrast in speech for hearing-impaired listeners; Unknown Source; (1990).

  • Representation, scaling, and time invariance in neural network speech recognition: Evidence from the recognition of stop consonants and vowels; Unknown Source; (1989).

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  • Articulatory asymmetries.; Unknown Source; (1986).

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  • Perception of anticipatory coarticulation effects in vowel-stop consonant-vowel sequences; Unknown Source; (1982).

  • Perception of anticipatory coarticulation effects; Journal of the Acoustical Society of America; (1981).

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