In recent work with Warren Maguire and Paul Heggarty, we have been exploring the possibilities for quantitative phonetic comparison of English accents. Currently, the ‘Sound Comparisons’ project (www.soundcomparisons.com) includes over 90 varieties of modern English. In some localities, up to three sub-varieties are also included to illustrate the potential of these techniques of comparison for...

The current understanding of listener sensitivity to regional accents comes from examination of speech processing in quiet and in noise. This study had two aims: 1) to examine the intelligibility of regional accents in a multitalker environment, and 2) to explore a methodological question of whether systematic regional features can be detected in the productions of only one representative talke...

Introduction A pervasive and fundamenta l property of spoken language is the nesting of quasi-periodic structures, ranging ti'om the vibration of the vocal cords to the iteration of syllables, accents, and higher-order prosodic objects. The long-range goal of the research reported here is to bring to bear on the study of this phenomenon the methods and insights of the study of dynamical systems...

This paper reports our project on “sound education” in second language teaching in Blackfoot. “Sound” in this context refers to word melody and pitch accent. As described in (Frantz, 2009), accents in some words impact meaning. For second language learners of Blackfoot, in addition to learning words with the correct pitch accents, it is also important to learn correct word melody. Sounding “rig...

Focus is central to our control of information flow in dialogue. Spoken language understanding systems therefore need to be able to detect focus automatically. It is well known that prominence is a key marker of focus in English, however, the relationship is not straight-forward. We present focus prediction models built using the NXT Switchboard corpus. We claim that a focus is more likely if a...

nowadays, english is the leading foreign language enjoying a prestigious position in many countries, including iran. in recent years, english is more and more popular in the world and the importance of learning english cannot be overstated in an increasingly interconnected and globalized world. in this regard, studying the status of language of the educated class of the society such as teachers...

This study investigated the effectiveness of using YouTube teaching materials with peer support on students’ mastery subject content learning, motivation, obstacles, and benefits they acquired in learning through this media. involved 60 undergraduate students attending English Language Teaching Method Course (ELTMC) at a university Banda Aceh, Indonesia. The used mixed methods: quantitative qua...

In this paper, we report on a two-part experiment aiming to assess and compare the performance of two types of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems on two different computational platforms when used to augment dictation workflows. The experiment was performed with a sample of speakers of three major languages and with different linguistic profiles: non-native English speakers; non-native ...