The present study examined how native English speakers in Canada assessed the degree of foreign accent in nonnative speech when they were required to focus on the content of an utterance. The native English listeners were asked to listen to English sentences produced by speakers of Japanese, Mandarin, and Tamil, and to rate their foreign accent on a 9-point scale in two different rating tasks. ...

This pilot study compares the timing of articulatory gestures to the timing of the tonal contour in South Swedish Accent 1 and Accent 2. Acoustic and articulatory data were collected with an EMA (Carstens AG501). Variables included the tonal alignment of the high tone H and the following low tone L to the vowel onset, the syllable offset, as well as to the lip aperture and the tongue body. Acou...

The production of speech involves an individual’s control of their various articulators (lips, tongue, larynx etc.) to produce auditory speech signals [1]. These movements can be utilised in the processing of visual speech and form the basis of speechreading. However, the production of speech by different talkers can be variable; physiology, accent and speech rate can all change the appearance ...

Accent is cited as an issue for speech recognition systems [1]. Research has shown that accent mismatch between the training and the test data will result in significant accuracy reduction in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. Using HMM based ASR trained on a standard English accent, our study shows that the error rates can be up to seven times higher for accented speech, than for stan...

this article addresses the phonetic and phonological representation of h- phrase accent in the tonal structure of persian pre-nuclear accents. in an experimental study, three groups of pre-nuclear accentual phrases, namely, phrases with antepenultimate, penultimate and final stress pattern, were selected for tonal examination. materials were designed so as to yield under-pressure and pressure f...

Previous studies indicated that the rightmost unit is the default position for bearing nuclear accent in multiple-focus condition in Standard Chinese. The present research investigated the accent realization for dual-focus sentences which has a leftmost nuclear accent. The syntactic form of [Subject Verb (Modifier1) Object1 (Modifier2) Object2] was adopted. A corrective focus was always assigne...

This study investigates acoustic and articulatory correlates of South Swedish word accents (Accent 1 vs. 2) – a tonal distinction traditionally associated with F0 timing. The study is motivated by previous findings on (i) the acoustic complexity of tonal prosody and (ii) tonal-articulatory interplay in other languages. Acoustic and articulatory (EMA) data from two controlled experiments are rep...

In two speeded acceptability experiments we tested which combination of prenuclear accent, nuclear accent and f0interpolation between them is best suited to signal a double contrast in German (i.e., a contrastive topic followed by a contrastive focus). The experimental utterances differed in the prenuclear accent (medialvs. late-peak, i.e., L+H* vs. L*+H), the nuclear accent (earlyvs. medial-pe...

1. Introduction Beckman (1986) draws a distinction between stress-accent and non-stress-accent (i.e., pitch-accent) languages. Stress-accent languages, such as English, convey accentual prominence by a combination of phonetic cues, including pitch, intensity and duration. Non-stress-accent languages, on the other hand, use only pitch as a correlate of accent. Tokyo Japanese is an example of the...

This study investigates the underlying tonal pattern of pitch accent, the domain of tone interaction, and the prosodic structure of Northern Kyungsang Korean (NKK) by examining tone-syllable alignment and the realization of pitch accent in different tonal/prosodic contexts. Sixty-four sentences produced by six native speakers of NKK were digitized and f0 values of each syllable as well as the f...