Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be applied in many Internet of Things (IoT) systems, e.g., smart farms, as a data collection platform. However, the UAV-IoT wireless channels may occasionally blocked by trees or high-rise buildings. An intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) to improve channel quality smartly signal via large number low-cost passive reflective elements. This article aims minimi...

BACKGROUND: Accentuation in Japanese loanword phonology has been an area of controversy. Previous linguists such as McCawley (1968) have suggested a traditional mora-based generalization: loanword accentuation in Japanese has a basic default pattern on the syllable containing the antepenultimate mora; while others claim that Japanese loanword accentuation follows the Latin stress rule (Kubozono...

The use of acoustic properties by French and German speakers in accentuating and de-accentuating words in accordance with changes in information weighting is examined. In particular, the role of duration is shown to differ for the two languages, confirming earlier findings. In addition, a difference in the relative contribution of F0, intensity and spectral balance is found for the prediction o...

The issue of the focal accentuation of contextually ‘given’ travel domain concepts in task-related Swedish dialogues is examined. An explanation for this focal accentuation is proposed using concepts within Centering theory, i.e. it is assumed that it is domain-related ‘Backward Centers’ that are associated with the prominent focal accents. The variation in the timing of the focal H ̄ is further...

Stereotype formation may be based on the exaggeration of real group differences (category accentuation) or the misperception of group differences that do not exist (illusory correlation). This research sought to account for both phenomena with J. K. Kruschke's (1996, 2001, 2003) attention theory of category learning. According to the model, the features of majority groups are learned earlier th...

The present article describes a corpus which was collected for the cross-language comparison of prominence. In the data analysis, the acoustic-phonetic properties of words spoken with two different levels of accentuation (de-accented and nuclear accented in non-contrastive narrow-focus) are examined in question-answer elicited sentences and iterative imitations (on the syllable ‘da’) produced b...

In this paper I propose an accent placement algorithm that locates accents on adpositions and particles for the use in a Dutch text-to-speech (TTS) system. The algorithm is intended to be a refinement of the rule that accents only content words, which is used in most TTS systems. Before the algorithm is set up, I discuss when adpositions and particles are accented in Dutch. For this empirical r...

Earlier studies of perceived strength of phrase boundaries (Fant, Nord and Kruckenberg, 1986; Fant and Kruckenberg, 1989) are briefly reviewed. Results are discussed in terms of speaker variability, acoustic cues and the semantic expectancy of the occurrence of a juncture. More recent studies on stress and accentuation (Fant and Kruckenberg, 1994; Fant, Hertegård and Kruckenberg, 1996) have bee...

This study investigates factors that influence the interpretation of ambiguous sentences containing the word only. When only appears preverbally in simple SVO constructions, it can be interpreted as associating with the direct object, the verb, or the entire verb phrase. An auditory sentence completion task was used to probe native-speaking English listeners for overall biases in the interpreta...

Two experiments examined whether varying degrees of event coherence influence the remembering of an event's actual duration. Relying on musical compositions (Experiment 1) or filmed narratives (Experiment 2) as experimental stimuli, the underlying hierarchy of information within events (i.e., melodic intervals or story elements) was either attentionally highlighted or obscured by placing a vary...