The Dutch dialect of Venlo has a lexical tone opposition comparable to the distinction between Accent I and Accent II in Scandinavian. The two word tone patterns are realised in a variety of different ways, depending on the intonation contour, on whether the word has a focus tone, and on whether it occurs finally or nonfinally in the intonational phrase (IP). Twelve such contexts are identified...

INTRODUCTION Gastro-oesophageal reflux occurs twice as much during transient lower oesophageal sphincter relaxations (TLOSRs) in patients with gastro-oesophageal reflux disease (GORD) compared to healthy volunteers (HVs). Our aim was to assess whether the localisation of the postprandial acid pocket and its interaction with a hiatal hernia (HH) play a role in the occurrence of acidic reflux dur...

The perception of prosodic prominence is known to be influenced by several distinct factors. In this study, we investigated the role of context, both global and local, in the prominence judgements of naı̈ve listeners. Monolingual English listeners marked where they heard prominence on pairs of twoword phrases (e.g. blue ball, green drum). Stimuli varied in whether or not the first phrase implied...

A new scheme of N-gram language modeling was proposed for Japanese, where word N-grams were calculated separately for the two cases: crossing and not crossing bunsetsu boundaries. Here, bunsetsu is a basic grammatical (and pronunciation) unit of Japanese. A similar scheme using accent phrase boundaries instead of bunsetsu boundaries has already been proposed by the authors with a certain succes...

Superpositional model of fundamental frequency (F0) contours as suggested by the Fujisaki model can well represent F0 movements of speech keeping a clear relation with linguistic information of utterances. Therefore, improvement of HMM-based speech synthesis is expected by using the merit of superpositional model. In this paper, a targets-based superpositional model is proposed in the light of ...

This pilot study compares the timing of articulatory gestures to the timing of the tonal contour in South Swedish Accent 1 and Accent 2. Acoustic and articulatory data were collected with an EMA (Carstens AG501). Variables included the tonal alignment of the high tone H and the following low tone L to the vowel onset, the syllable offset, as well as to the lip aperture and the tongue body. Acou...

We validated a canopy backscatter model for loblolly pine forest stands at the Duke Forest, North Carolina, by comparing the observed and modelled SAR backscatter from the stands. Given the SAR backscatter data calibration uncertainty, the model made good predictions of C-H H, C-HV, L-HH, L·HV, L-VV, P-HH, and P-HVbackscatter for most of 25 stands studied. The model overestimated C-VV backscatt...

Hiatal hernia (HH) is associated with gastro-oesophageal reflux (GOR) and/or GOR disease and may contribute to idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). We hypothesised that HH evaluated by computed tomography is more common in IPF than in asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and correlates with abnormal GOR measured by pH probe testing. Rates of HH were compared in three cohorts,...

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-...

As South Connaught Irish typically uses the same (falling) tune type in both questions and declaratives, this paper examines whether sentence mode might be differentiated in this dialect by other aspects of the contour realization, namely declination slope, peak height and pitch level. A set of matched declaratives (DEC), whquestions (WHQ) and yes/no questions (YNQ) of two phrase lengths (with ...