Productions in a foreign language (L2) are commonly affected by segmental and suprasegmental features of the phonetic/phonological system of the mother tongue (L1). As for the segmental level, the sounds of the L2, which are close or similar to others of the L1, are deeply influenced by the native system; these influences are perceived as foreign accent but could also be acceptable from the poi...

This paper presents our approach to automatically detect tone nuclei, and to use their features for recognizing lexical tones of Chinese continuous speech. We have suggested that Fundamental frequency (F0) contour of a syllable usually consists of three segments: onset course, tone nucleus and offset course. Among them, only tone nucleus contains key features for tone discrimination, hence the ...

The present study investigated the training benefits of segmental vs. suprasegmental aspects for intelligibility and comprehensibility spoken English as a Foreign Language (EFL). Five groups lower intermediate EFL learners were formed by random assignment. A pretest speaking skills, intelligibility, learners’ speech confirmed that five homogeneous before starting program. control group listened...

It has been posited that the role of prosody in lexical segmentation is elevated when the speech signal is degraded or unreliable. Using predictions from Cutler and Norris' [J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 14, 113-121 (1988)] metrical segmentation strategy hypothesis as a framework, this investigation examined how individual suprasegmental and segmental cues to syllabic stress contribut...

This paper describes an eye tracking experiment to study the processing of diphone synthesis, unit selection synthesis, and human speech taking segmental and suprasegmental speech quality into account. The results showed that both factors influenced the processing of human and synthetic speech, and confirmed that eye tracking is a promising albeit time consuming research method to evaluate synt...