This paper offers a phonological analysis of the compatibility between vowel quality and lexical accent in Standard Japanese (SJ). This work benefits not only from phonological considerations but also from phonetic analysis. Analyses from these two perspectives converge on the claim that the vowel /a/ attracts lexical accents, while on the other hand /u/ repels lexical accents. Acoustic measure...

The goal of this study is to explore the position of pitch accent commands relative to the accented syllable in final and non-final words for absolute interrogative sentences in Spanish. Fundamental frequency parameters are obtained from the Fujisaki model. Results indicate that accent commands for three-syllable words in final position are associated with late peaks no matter which the stresse...

The performance of automatic speech recognition systems degrades with increasing mismatch between the training and testing scenarios. Differences in speaker accents are a significant source of such mismatch. The traditional approach to deal with multiple accents involves pooling data from several accents during training and building a single model in multi-task fashion, where tasks correspond t...

Phrase accents, one of the three tonal categories assumed by much recent research on intonation, are expected to associate with a prosodic boundary (e.g. the end of the utterance) but not to phonetically align with a specific tone-bearing unit (TBU), such as a stressed syllable. This paper presents experimental evidence on the intonation of Cypriot Greek polar questions suggesting that phrase a...

The differences between formants of British, Australian and American English accents are analysed and ranked. An improved formant model based on linear prediction (LP) feature analysis and a two-dimensional(2D) hidden Markov model (HMM) of formants is employed for estimation of the formant frequencies and bandwidths of vowels and diphthongs. Comparative analysis of the formant trajectories, the...

In multicultural and multilingual societies, perceptual flexibility – the ability to recognize words with novel pronunciations, such as those encountered in unfamiliar dialects and accents – is an essential skill for children’s receptive language development. Without this ability frequent errors in mapping input to words in the lexicon would occur. To assess how unfamiliar accents impact word r...

Automatic prosodic marking is very important in speech signal processing, since its results are required in many subsections, e.g. speech synthesis and speech recognition. The most important prosodic features on the linguistic level are the marking of accents and phrases. In this paper, we develop an automatic algorithm for marking accents and phrases which analyzes the F0 contour by using the ...

In this paper, we propose a method that use i-vectors and model adaptation techniques to improve the performance of deep neural networks(DNNs) based multi-accent Mandarin speech recognition. I-vectors which are speaker-specific features have been proved to be effective when used in accent identification. They can be used in company with conventional spectral features as the input features of DN...

The UK is a diverse society where individuals regularly interact with speakers with different accents. Whilst there is a growing body of research on the impact of speaker accent on comprehension in people with aphasia, there is none which explores their ability to identify accents. This study investigated the ability of this group to identify the geographical origins of a speaker. Age-matched p...