Work is progressing on a keyword lexicon aimed at enabling the synthesis of various regional accents of English. This paper focuses on a particular issue, that of vowels before orthographic 'r'. These vowels are discussed with respect to rhotic and nonrhotic accents, in terms of both keyword sets and phonetic realisation. Criteria for the use of keysymbols are discussed, and it is noted that th...

Adults are generally adept at recognizing familiar words in unfamiliar accents. However, studies testing young children’s abilities to cope with accent-related variation in the speech signal have generated mixed results, with some work emphasizing toddlers’ early competence and other work focusing more on their long-lasting difficulties in this domain. Here, we set out to unify these two perspe...

The problem addressed is automatically detecting, measuring and correcting nonnative pronunciation characteristics (so-called "for-eign accents") in foreign language speech. Systemic, structural and realizational differences between L1 (native language) and L2 (target language) appear as phone insertions, deletions and substitutions. A bilingual phone recognizer using native-trained acoustic mo...

Source Generator Based Prosodic Features John H.L. Hansen and Levent M. Arslan Robust Speech Processing Laboratory Duke University Department of Electrical Engineering Box 90291, Durham, North Carolina 27708-0291 ABSTRACT Speaker accent is an important issue in the formulation of robust speaker independent recognition systems. Knowledge gained from a reliable accent classi cation approach could...

This paper compares ten vowels sounds across gender and accent. Each formant for each vowel was analysed individually across data sets, but no comparison was drawn directly between the formant relationship within each vowel. The objective here was to examine the formants individually across gender and accent to establish a method for transforming vowel quality in a rule-based synthesis system a...

Native speakers of Spanish with different amounts of experience with English classified stop-consonant voicing (/b/ versus /p/) across different speech accents: English-accented Spanish, native Spanish, and native English. While listeners with little experience with English classified target voicing with an English- or Spanish-like voice onset time (VOT) boundary, predicted by contextual VOT, l...

Two experiments investigated whether listeners change their vowel categorization decisions to adjust to different accents of British English. Listeners from different regions of England gave goodness ratings on synthesized vowels embedded in natural carrier sentences that were spoken with either a northern or southern English accent. A computer minimization algorithm adjusted F1, F2, F3, and du...