Can mother tongue speakers of the Nguni and Sotho languages determine each other’s first language (L1) based on their English accent? Contrasting claims have been made in this regard. While Black South African English (BSAE) can be distinguished clearly from Standard South African English (SSAE) on the levels of both production and perception, insufficient evidence exists that such a distinctio...

The identification and correction of prosodic deviations in second-language speech still poses a significant challenge for computer-aided language learning. With this ultimate goal in mind, the current study compares utterances by Cantonese speakers of Canadian English with those of native English subjects through both acoustic analysis and perceptual evaluation. We aim to find measurable proso...

[Se193] E. O. Selkirk. Sentence prosody: Intonation stress and phrasing. In Handbook of Phonological Theory, 1. Goldsmith, ed. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1993. [Sid79] C. Sidner. Toward a Computational Theory ofDefinite Anaphora Comprehension in English. MIT Technical Report AI-TR-537, 1979. [SMG88] A. Sanford, K. Moar, and S. Garrod. Proper names as controllers of discourse focus. Language and S...

Foreign accent identification is a new challenging problem closely related to other relatively recent fields of the multilinguality area such as dialect identification and language identification. This paper describes an automatic identification system for English accents from 6 different European countries. The approach is basedon a parallel set of ergodic nets with context independent HMM uni...

The Speech Transcription Analysis Tool (STAT) is an open source tool for aligning and comparing two phonetically transcribed texts of human speech. The output analysis is a parameterized set of phonological differences. These differences are based upon a selectable set of binary phonetic features such as [voice], [continuant], [high], etc. STAT was initially designed to provide sets of phonolog...

The formant space of three major English accents namely British, American and Australian are modelled and used for accent conversion. Accent synthesis, through modification of the acoustic parameters of speech, provides a means for assessing the perceptual contribution of each parameter on conveying an accent. An improved method based on a linear prediction (LP) model feature analysis and a 2-D...

How early in life, and in what situations, are children sensitive to speakers’ accents? Some researchers have suggested that accent is an early-developing, perhaps intrinsic, signal of group membership. However, other studies find little sensitivity to or awareness of accent in young children. Three experiments reported here examine 3-5-yearolds’ comprehension of, and social decision-making wit...