In this contribution an algorithm for the automatic assignment of sentence accents in written Dutch, developed by Kager and Quene, is evaluated experimentally. Results show that the output of the algorithm is judged significantly more adequate than accents randomly distributed over content words but significantly less adequate than the accents produced by a trained news broadcaster and those re...

An analysis of prenuclear accents in read speech is carried out with the aim of finding instances of regularity in their distribution. Significant differences are identified with respect to position within the phrase and phrase length, some of which are correlated with declination and pitch span narrowing. Only a weak interaction is found between nuclear and prenuclear pitch accents. No tendenc...

In two perception experiments on read German, we investigate how far different accent positions and accent types are related to degrees of perceived givenness both in sentences in isolation and in context. Results reveal a stepwise decrease in the degree of perceived givenness from deaccentuation and prenuclear accents through low and early peak nuclear accents to high and rising nuclear accent...

The paper reports on a web-based perception experiment investigating the perceptual prominence of seven attested nuclear pitch accent types plus deaccentuation in German. Unlike previous studies which link prominence judgments of accents to aspects of intonational meaning, the present study directly asks for the perceived degree of prosodic prominence. Results reveal gradual differences between...

Within the AM model of intonational phonology, nuclear rather than prenuclear pitch accents typically monopolize our interest as the purported pivots for meaning distinctions among utterances. This paper compares, through one production and two perception experiments, the prenuclear field in statements versus polar questions in Greek, which can be string identical, differing only in intonation....

Speech interfaces are becoming pervasive among the common public with the prevalence of smart phones and cloud-based computing. This pushes Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems to handle wide range of environments including different channels, noise conditions and speakers with varying accents. This thesis focuses on the impact of speakers’ accents on the ASR models and techniques to make...

Most English text-to-speech synthesisers offer one of only two accents: General American or RP. Developing a new accent is laborious, since it is not possible to choose one accent as a base form and systematically translate to others. We use the approach of Wells ([1]), categorising vowels in terms of abstract keywords that encode classes of words. Thus it is unnecessary to use a phonemic trans...

Accents provide information about the speaker's geographical, socio-economic, and ethnic background. Research in applied psychology and sociolinguistics suggests that we generally prefer our own accent to other varieties of our native language and attribute more positive traits to it. Despite the widespread influence of accents on social interactions, educational and work settings the neural un...

The differences between the formant trajectories of British and broad Australian English accents are analysed and used for accent conversion. An improved formant model based on linear prediction (LP) feature analysis and a 2-D hidden Markov model (HMM) of formants is employed for estimation of the formant trajectories of vowels and diphthongs. Comparative analysis of the formant values, the for...