Aleese Block

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About

Aleese Block is a researcher whose work sits at the intersection of speech perception, phonetics, and speech technology. Her primary research areas include coarticulation, speech synthesis evaluation, and the perceptual consequences of articulatory variation. In her most cited work, *Partial compensation for coarticulatory vowel nasalization across concatenative and neural text-to-speech* (2021, 13 citations), Block investigates how listeners perceive coarticulatory vowel nasality generated by different text-to-speech (TTS) methods in American English. Through a carefully designed four-interval same-different (4IAX) task, she compared concatenative and neural TTS systems, revealing that listeners show partial perceptual compensation for coarticulatory nasality—though the degree of compensation varies depending on the synthesis method. This work is notable for bridging phonetic theory with applied speech technology, offering insights into how synthetic speech can be made more natural and perceptually robust. Block’s research contributes to our understanding of how the human auditory system processes coarticulatory cues, with implications for improving TTS systems used in assistive technologies, virtual assistants, and language learning tools. Her findings highlight the importance of incorporating phonetic detail into neural TTS architectures to enhance intelligibility and naturalness.