Speaker variability strongly impacts human perception and technology performance, yet large-scale, systematic study of the acoustic characteristics involved is rarely undertaken. This study provides statistics on selected segmental and suprasegmental acoustic parameters from measures made on spontaneous conversational telephone speech from 160 speakers in the Switchboard Corpus. Since spontaneo...

Lumbar dorsal root potentials (DRP) were elicited by nucleus locus coeruleus (LC) stimulation in the cat. Inhibition, by LC stimulation, of dorsal horn cells responding to noxious inputs corresponded in time with the DRPs evoked by LC stimulation. Comparing cutaneous stimulation-evoked DRPs with LC stimulation-evoked DRPs and their respective effects on dorsal horn single-unit activity suggeste...

In tone languages, pitch variation is one of the primary cues to distinguish lexical meanings. Similar to consonants and vowels, lexical tones play a role in accessing to lexical information, but these segmental and suprasegmental features may have different roles in this process. In this study, we examine the priming effects of tones, consonants, and vowels in an auditory task of lexical decis...

Foreign accent is judged by the degree to which the non-native (L2) production is perceived differently from production patterns by native speakers (NL) [1]. Both segmental and suprasegmental features are shown influential in accent perception by NL speakers or L2 learners [2]-[4]. However, roles of prosodic cues in the process are not well known yet. Our study aims to investigate effects of in...

In order to better teach pronunciation to students, it is necessary to gain a better appreciation of the types of pronunciation patterns and issues that Japanese speakers encounter when attempting to speak in English. To highlight some of these issues, a sample dialogue between two Japanese learners was recorded and analyzed for segmental and suprasegmental features. The analysis revealed that ...

In the present behavioral and fMRI study, we investigated for the first time interindividual variability in word stress processing in a language with variable stress position (German) in order to identify behavioral predictors and neural correlates underlying these differences. It has been argued that speakers of languages with variable stress should perform relatively well in tasks tapping int...

Abstract Precise auditory perception at a subcortical level (neural representation and encoding of sound) has been suggested as form implicit L2 aptitude in naturalistic settings. Emerging evidence suggests that such explains some variance speech production among adult learners with different first language backgrounds immersion experience. By examining 46 Chinese English, the current study lon...

BACKGROUND While previous studies have shown that children affected by dyslexia exhibit a deficit in categorical perception of segmental features in alphabetic languages, it remains unclear whether the categorical perception deficit generalizes to nonalphabetic languages at the suprasegmental level. In this study, we investigated the occurrence of categorical perception deficit in Mandarin lexi...

Automatic speaker nativeness assessment has multiple applications, such as second language learning and IVR systems. In this paper we view this as a regression problem, since the available labels are on a continuous scale. Multiple approaches were applied, such as phonotactic models, i-vectors, and goodness of pronunciation, covering both segmental and suprasegmental features. Different phonota...

We introduce a new version of the pronunciation software program WinPitch LTL. This completely redesigned version is much more easier to use by the teacher and learner alike, and contains the regular function of prosodic real time display, variable speed playback, prosodic morphing, on screen teacher comment display, etc. New features include video capabilities (the program can process multimed...