English speech based on accent dependent parallel phoneme recognition (PPR) has been developed. The classifier is designed to process continuous speech and to discriminate between native Australian English (AuE) speakers and two migrant speaker groups with foreign accents, whose first languages are Lebanese Arabic (LA) and South Vietnamese (SV). The training of the system can be automated and i...

The acoustic differences between Afrikaans and South African English, spoken as first (L1) and second (L2) language, are measured for nine short vowels. The spoken language data base of 22 male speakers, collected for comparative studies, is described. The features used in an initial comparison of the isolated vowels and vowels in CVC words are the first three formant values and ratios. Signifi...

Foreign accents in second language (L2) production are caused by interference from the phonological system and phonetic realization of the speaker’s first language (L1), including both segmental and prosodic features. This paper examines the intonation structure of Seoul Korean and its realization by American English speakers. Four English speakers of Korean, differing in fluency, and two Korea...

We evaluated how Australian listeners perceive consonants spoken in two unfamiliar accents of English (Cockney, Yorkshire) and how consonant perception is influenced by short-term exposure to those accents. Results indicate that Australians misperceive some consonants from these accents and that short-term pre-exposure to them actually leads to further degraded performance in consonant categori...

Welsh and Northern English), and two American ones (New York and South Carolina, to represent Eastern and Southern American); regional features were based primarily on the descriptions in [1], with native-speaker input where possible. The regional accents are abbreviated in this paper as: Br(Sc) = Edinburgh; Br(W) = Cardiff; Br(N) = Leeds; Am(E) = New York; and Am(S) = South Carolina. For the s...

This paper compares and quantifies the differences between formants of speech across accents. The cross entropy information measure is used to compare the differences between the formants of the vowels of three major English accents namely British, American and Australian. An improved formant estimation method, based on a linear prediction (LP) model feature analysis and a hidden Markov model (...

This paper compares and quantifies the differences between formants of speech across accents. The cross entropy information measure is used to compare the differences between the formants of the vowels of three major English accents namely British, American and Australian. An improved formant estimation method, based on a linear prediction (LP) model feature analysis and a hidden Markov model (...

Native (L1) listeners are more accurate at understanding speech spoken in their own accent in noise than they are at understanding speech spoken in other L1 or non-native (L2) accents. The present study investigated whether this accent advantage is affected by perceptual adaptation. Standard Southern British English (SE) listeners were presented with L1 and L2 accents in noise, either in single...

We report three experiments, based on test sentences read aloud, on the influence of sentence position and phonological vowel length on the alignment of accent-related f0 peaks in Scottish Standard English (SSE) and Southern British English (RP). One experiment deals with prenuclear accent peaks and the other two with nuclear accent peaks. Three findings confirm reports in the recent literature...