The present report reviews findings about F0 patterns and in specific the realisation of the Swedish accent 1 and accent 2 tone patterns. We have developed a novel system for normalizing F0 contours which allows the handling of male and female data in a common frame. It also facilitates the sorting out of individual patterns from a norm. For this purpose we have defined a semitone scale with a ...

Japanese words are either accented (HL tonal melody: H | a m L | e ‘rain’ ) or unaccented (H tonal melody: a m H | e ‘candy’). Whereas the locus of accent (i.e. mora that bears H tone before a L tone, represented henceforth by acute accent) is lexically determined in native and Sino-Japanese nouns (e.g. híru ‘leech’; hirú ‘noon’), in loanwords it is predictable enough to suggest a grammatical e...

Listeners rapidly process tonal composition and pitch accent placement within an utterance to create expectations about its pragmatic meaning and information structure. It is still unknown whether the nuclear pitch accent alone or a combination of pitch accent and the following edge tone are needed in order to process intonational meaning in French. This study investigates the online comprehens...

This study examined whether late-learning English-German L2 learners and late-learning German-English L2 learners use prosodic cues to disambiguate temporarily ambiguous L1 and L2 sentences during speech production. Experiments 1a and 1b showed that English-German L2 learners and German-English L2 learners used a pitch rise and pitch accent to disambiguate prepositional phrase-attachment senten...

The present study explores the phonetic implementation of accentual H(igh) tone of the Akita dialect of Japanese, specifically its timing control. Lexical accent in the dialect is implemented as an eminence in F0. The conspicuous feature is that F0 does not fall sharply as in Tokyo Japanese. Two hypotheses are examined concerning the extent of the duration of the pitch summit. One is that the H...

Determining pitch accents in a sentence is a key task for a textto-speech (TTS) system. We describe some methods for pitch accent assignment which make use of features that contain information about a complete phrase or sentence, in contrast to most previous work which has focused on using features local to a syllable or word. Pitch accent prediction is performed using three different technique...

A foreign accent involves discrete phonetic features which can be acoustically analyzed. However, these phonetic features are often masked perceptually by other features, such as prosodic features. This study presents an acoustic analysis of the postvocalic /l/ in Chinese learners, as an example, and puts these results into context with a perception test, which targets the overall aspects of an...

We describe a perceptual experiment whose goal is to compare perceptual sensitivity to pitch accent contrasts in nuclear and prenuclear positions. The material consists of Czech sentences which have been resynthesized with controlled intonation. The results show that changes in nuclear pitch accents are perceived more sharply than changes in prenuclear pitch accents, and that the H* accent is p...

This paper presents a set of novel duration features for detecting pitch accent and phrase boundaries, which depend on articulatory timing rather than segmental duration information. The features are computed from the detected syllable nuclei and boundaries, using peaks and valleys in an energy contour but also leveraging information from a simple HMM phone manner class recognizer to increase r...

This paper reports the results of a study on the prosodic marking of information status, i.e., whether information is ‘new’ or ‘given’ in the discourse, in Tokyo Japanese noun phrases (NPs). Previous investigations have indicated that such discoursal information is reflected in accent distribution in Dutch NPs, and in degree of accentuation in Italian NPs. An acoustic analysis of Japanese data,...