Current research on spoken language does not provide a consistent picture as to whether prosody, the melody and rhythm of speech, conveys a specific meaning. Perception studies show that English listeners assign meaning to prosodic patterns, and, for instance, associate some accents with contrast, whereas Dutch listeners behave more controversially. In two ERP studies we tested how Dutch listen...

Among other cues, pitch and temporal accents contribute to grouping in musical sequences. However, exactly how they combine remains unclear, possibly because of the role of structural organization. In 3 experiments, participants rated the perceived metrical grouping of sequences that either adhered to the rules of tonal Western musical pitch structure (musical key) or did not (atonal). The tona...

This paper provides an introduction to the acoustic–phonetic structure of English regional accents and presents a signal processing method for the modeling and transformation of the acoustic correlates of English accents for example from British English to American English. The focus of this paper is on the modeling of intonation and duration correlates of accents as the modeling of formants is...

This paper highlights the differences in spectral features between British, Australian and American English accents and applies the cross-entropy information measure for comparative quantification of the impacts of the variations of accents, speaker groups and recordings on the probability models of spectral features of phonetic units of speech. Comparison of the cross entropies of formants and...

Prosody, particularly accent, aids comprehension by drawing attention to important elements such as the information that answers a question. A study using ERP registration investigated how the brain deals with the interpretation of prosodic prominence. Sentences were embedded in short dialogues and contained accented elements that were congruous or incongruous with respect to a preceding questi...

The goal of the present paper is to identify some of the differences in the intonation of Catalan and Spanish as spoken in Majorca. The tonal features we investigated were: (1) utterance-final pitch accents in broad focus declaratives, and (2) local contrastive focus pitch accents. Previous research, mostly on related varieties, such as Central Catalan and Castilian Spanish, had indirectly sugg...

This paper describes a simple mechanism for typesetting Hebrew with vowel points. Hebrew uses a large set of accents that represent vowels, consonant modifiers, and cantillation instructions. These accents are placed above, below, or inside letters; a single letter can carry several accents. The solution that we describe, which is designed for PostScript [2] output devices, leaves the placement...

In this study, we describe an automatic detector for prosodically salient or emphasized words in speech. Knowledge of whether a word is emphatic or not could improve Text-to-Speech synthesis as well as spoken language summarization. Previous work on emphasis detection has focused on the automatic recognition of pitch accents. Our model extends earlier research by automatically identifying empha...

Work is progressing on a keyword lexicon aimed at enabling the synthesis of various regional accents of English. This paper focuses on a particular issue, that of vowels before orthographic 'r'. These vowels are discussed with respect to rhotic and nonrhotic accents, in terms of both keyword sets and phonetic realisation. Criteria for the use of keysymbols are discussed, and it is noted that th...