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...

This work investigates the impact of non-native English accents on the performance of an large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) system. Based on the GlobalPhone corpus [1], a speech corpus was collected consisting of English sentences read by native speakers of Bulgarian, Chinese, German and Indian languages. To accommodate for non-native pronunciations, two directions are follo...

As reflected in the concept of Global Englishes , English mediates global communication, where speakers represent not merely those from English-speaking countries like United Kingdom or States but also people a wide range linguistic backgrounds, who speak language with diverse accents. Thus, to communicate internationally, cultivating maximized listening proficiency for and positive attitudes t...

We worked to create an effective classifier for foreign accented English speech in order to determine the origins of the speaker. Using pitch features, we first classify between two accents, German and Mandarin, and then expanded to a set of twelve accents. We achieved a notable improvement over random performance and gained insights into the strengths of and relationships between the accents w...

Learners frequently experience phonologically inconsistent input, such as exposure to multiple accents. Yet, little is known about the consequences of phonological inconsistency for language learning. The current study examines vocabulary acquisition with different degrees of phonological inconsistency, ranging from no inconsistency (e.g., both talkers call a picture /vig/) to mild but detectab...

Homonyms are partitioned into smaller groups by their accents. The property of accents in English, Japanese and Chinese languages is different, but has a common role to distinguish homonyms. The difference of the role of accents in the three languages is shown by a parameter of the generalized Stirling distribution, derived from Pitman’s random partition, fitted to dictionary datasets.

We describe the acoustic-prosodic and syntactic-prosodic annotation and classification of boundaries, accents and sentence mood integrated in the Verbmobil system for the three languages German, English, and Japanese. For the acoustic-prosodic classification, a large feature vector with normalized prosodic features is used. For the three languages, a multilingual prosody module was developed th...