BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Deficits of the aging auditory system negatively affect older listeners in terms of speech communication, resulting in limitations to their social lives. To improve their perceptual skills, the goal of this study was to investigate the effects of time alteration, selective word stress, and varying sentence lengths on the speech perception of older listeners. SUBJECTS...

Standard linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches to stress assignment argue that the position of word is determined on basis abstract information such as syllable weight number syllables in word. In present study, we contrasted this approach with a perspective based learning analogies according which speakers learn associate basic form cues position. To do so, use simple two-layer neural net...

In the present study we investigated the effect of semantic context on the perception of words that differ only in the lexical stress pattern. Our study was based on the disyllabic German word AUGUST. Depending on whether the lexical stress is on the first or the second syllable the word refers to either a name or a month. By means of a forced-choice identification experiment we tested to what ...

Word pronunciations, consisting of phoneme sequences and the associated syllabification and stress patterns, are vital for both speech recognition and text-to-speech (TTS) systems. For speech recognition phoneme sequences for words may be learned from audio data. We train recurrent neural network (RNN) based models to predict the syllabification and stress pattern for such pronunciations making...

The prosody of a prototypical Norwegian word is characterized by the following properties: (i) it is disyllabic, (ii) the initial syllable is bimoraic and stressed, and (iii) the final syllable is monomoraic and unstressed (Kristoffersen 2000). The weight of the initial syllable can be realized either with a long vowel or by closing the syllable, e.g. with a geminate. Norwegian words can also b...

Languages with primarily delimitative function of word stress commonly make use of accentual phrases (APs) in their intonational phonology (e.g. Tamil or French). Slovak and Hungarian are genetically unrelated but geographically close languages with word-initial lexical stress. In this paper we compared the stylised f0 of single accent groups (AGs) with the f0 level pattern of the entire intona...

This investigation studied the influence of lexical factors, known to impact lexical access in adults, on the word retrieval of children. Participants included 320 typical and atypical (word-finding difficulties) language-learning children, ranging in age from 7 to 12 years. Lexical factors examined included word frequency, age-of-acquisition, neighborhood density, neighborhood frequency, and s...

In phrases such as THIRteen MEN, stress in the first word is shifted forward from its canonical word-final position. Our general hypothesis is that this stress shift is controlled in part by the global rhythmical pattern of the utterance, informally defined as a Rhythmic Constraint on onset times of stressed vowels, in real time. This hypothesis yields two specific predictions about the occurre...

Although word stress is usually seen as a powerful speechsegmentation cue, the results of several cross-modal fragment priming experiments reveal strong limitations to stress-based segmentation. When stress was pitted against phonotactic and coarticulatory cues, substantial effects of the latter two cues were found, but there was no evidence for stress-based segmentation. However, when the stim...

This work aims at examining three classes of acoustic correlates of lexical stress in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) in three speaking styles: informal interview, phrase reading and word list reading. In the framework of an international collaboration, a parallel corpus was recorded in the three speaking styles with 10 subjects so far in each one of the following languages: Swedish, English, French,...