A method was developed to utilize linguistic information (lexical accent types and syntactic boundaries) to improve the performance of the automatic extraction of the F0 contour generation process model commands. The extraction scheme is first to smooth the observed F0 contour by a piecewise 3 order polynomial function and to locate accent command positions by taking the derivative of the funct...

Recognition of foreign accented speech remains among the most difficult tasks in automatic speech recognition. It was observed that using models trained on foreign data together with native models improves the recognition for speakers with foreign accent. However such an approach degrades the recognition performances on native speakers. In order to avoid such performance degradation the degree ...

In the present study, event-related brain potentials (ERP) were recorded to investigate the role of pitch accent and lexical tone in spoken discourse comprehension. Chinese was used as material to explore the potential difference in the nature and time course of brain responses to sentence meaning as indicated by pitch accent and to lexical meaning as indicated by tone. In both cases, the pitch...

There is a systematic relationship between stress accent and vocalic identity in spontaneous English discourse (the Switchboard corpus composed of telephone dialogues). Low vowels are much more likely to be fully accented than their high vocalic counterparts. And conversely, high vowels are far more likely to lack stress accent than low or mid vocalic segments. Such patterns imply that stress a...

Experience, attitudes, and expectations have been identified as separate influences on speech perception and comprehension across groups. In this study, we investigate the interaction among these three variables. 58 Australia-born participants completed an online survey and a vowel categorization task. The survey examined participants’ experience with Vietnamese-accented English and their attit...

Introduction The Syrian conflict has resulted in over 2.3 million child refugees in the Middle East and the prevalence of early marriage has reportedly increased among displaced Syrian families. This study explores the underlying factors contributing to child marriage among Syrian refugees in Lebanon with the goal of informing community-based strategies to address the issue. Methods In July-A...

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...

The present study examined how native English speakers in Canada assessed the degree of foreign accent in nonnative speech when they were required to focus on the content of an utterance. The native English listeners were asked to listen to English sentences produced by speakers of Japanese, Mandarin, and Tamil, and to rate their foreign accent on a 9-point scale in two different rating tasks. ...

Screening of 488 Syrian unaccompanied minor refugees (< 18 years-old) in Berlin showed low prevalence of intestinal parasites (Giardia, 7%), positive schistosomiasis serology (1.4%) and absence of hepatitis B. Among 44 ill adult Syrian refugees examined at GeoSentinel clinics worldwide, cutaneous leishmaniasis affected one in three patients; other noteworthy infections were active tuberculosis ...

This pilot study compares the timing of articulatory gestures to the timing of the tonal contour in South Swedish Accent 1 and Accent 2. Acoustic and articulatory data were collected with an EMA (Carstens AG501). Variables included the tonal alignment of the high tone H and the following low tone L to the vowel onset, the syllable offset, as well as to the lip aperture and the tongue body. Acou...