Accent bias is a consequence of ethnocentrism. No studies have examined accent bias across educational levels in the U.S., much less across students and professionals in speech language pathology (SLP), a field that requires multicultural sensitivity training. This study examines nonnative accent perception among three groups—high schoolers, SLP students, and SLP professionals. One-hundred-and-...

Accent is cited as an issue for speech recognition systems [1]. Research has shown that accent mismatch between the training and the test data will result in significant accuracy reduction in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. Using HMM based ASR trained on a standard English accent, our study shows that the error rates can be up to seven times higher for accented speech, than for stan...

Multiple acoustic dimensions signal speech categories. However, dimensions vary in their informativeness; some are more diagnostic of category membership than others. Speech categorization reflects these dimensional regularities such that diagnostic dimensions carry more "perceptual weight" and more effectively signal category membership to native listeners. Yet perceptual weights are malleable...

This paper is concerned with automatic speech recognition (ASR) for accented speech. Given a small amount of speech from a new speaker, is it better to apply speaker adaptation to the baseline, or to use accent identification (AID) to identify the speaker’s accent and select an accent-dependent acoustic model? Three accent-based model selection methods are investigated: using the ‘true’ accent ...

The issue of markedness of tonal accents in North Germanic (most Swedish and Norwegian dialects) has never been settled. For a long time, it looked like there was reasonable agreement that the distinction was privative and that it was accent 2 that was marked, accent 1 representing default intonation (Sweet, 1877:155, Elert, 1964:197, Haugen, 1967, Kristoffersen, 1993, Riad, 1998). Recently – a...

Di erent languages sometimes use di erent acoustic manners to transmit the same kind of linguistic information. This fact lets us easily suppose that learners tend to transmit the information in a manner of not a language to learn but their native language. While English word accent is linguistically almost the same as Japanese one, the word accent acoustically di ers between the two languages....