Poetry is an artistic form of communication that may or may not contain meter, rhyme, or lexical content [1]. We examined how the temporal regularity of spoken German poetry varied as a function of these features. Using a beat tracker that was previously used to measure speech rate based on moments of acoustic stress [2], we examined how stress rate and variability were influenced by meter, rhy...

This study investigated the perceptual effect of F0 peakdelay on L1 / L2 perception of English lexical stress. A bisyllabic English non-word ‘nini’ /nInI/ whose F0 was set to reach its peak in the second syllable was embedded in a frame sentence and used as the stimulus of the perceptual experiment. Native English and Japanese speakers were asked to determine lexical stress locations in the exp...

This study addressed the problems of our previous study [5] and investigated the perceptual effect of F0 peak-delay on L1 / L2 perception of English lexical stress. A trisyllabic English nonsense word ‘ninini’ /nInInI/ whose F0 was set to reach its peak around the second syllable was embedded in a frame sentence and used as the stimulus of the perceptual experiment. Native English and Japanese ...

Children with developmental disabilities such as childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) require repeated intervention sessions with a speech therapist, sometimes extending over several years. Technology-based therapy tools offer the potential to reduce the demanding workload of speech therapists as well as time and cost for families. In response to this need, we have developed “Tabby Talks,” a multi...

This paper investigates the use of multi-distribution deep neural networks (MD-DNNs) for automatic lexical stress detection and pitch accent detection, which are useful for suprasegmental mispronunciation detection and diagnosis in second-language (L2) English speech. The features used in this paper cover syllable-based prosodic features (including maximum syllable loudness, syllable nucleus du...

Although vowel quality is an important cue to the perception of English lexical stress, few studies have examined the role this cue plays for non-native speakers. Previous research found that Mandarin speakers had problems using vowel reduction as a cue in English lexical stress production. Assuming native-like perception is a prerequisite to native-like production for non-native speech, this s...