1. Introduction Beckman (1986) draws a distinction between stress-accent and non-stress-accent (i.e., pitch-accent) languages. Stress-accent languages, such as English, convey accentual prominence by a combination of phonetic cues, including pitch, intensity and duration. Non-stress-accent languages, on the other hand, use only pitch as a correlate of accent. Tokyo Japanese is an example of the...

This study investigates the underlying tonal pattern of pitch accent, the domain of tone interaction, and the prosodic structure of Northern Kyungsang Korean (NKK) by examining tone-syllable alignment and the realization of pitch accent in different tonal/prosodic contexts. Sixty-four sentences produced by six native speakers of NKK were digitized and f0 values of each syllable as well as the f...

This paper introduces the first online and free framework for teaching and learning Japanese prosody including word accent and phrase intonation. This framework is called OJAD (Online Japanese Accent Dictionary) [1] and it provides three functions. 1) Visual, auditory, systematic, and comprehensive illustration of patterns of accent change (accent sandhi) of verbs and adjectives. Here only the ...

A wide range of aspects are contained within the speech signal which provides information concerning a particular speaker’s characteristics. Accent is a linguistic trait of speaker identity. It indicates the speaker’s language and social background. The goal of this study is to provide perceptual assessment of accent variation in US native English. The main issue considered is how different com...

This paper considers automatic accent recognition system performance in relation to the specific nature of the accent data. This is of relevance to the forensic application, where an accent recogniser may have a place in casework involving various accent classification tasks with different challenges attached. The study presented here is composed of two main parts. Firstly, it examines the perf...

Little experimental evidence exists for how prosodic/ intonational information might affect the generation of an implicature. We provide online evidence that the combination of an L+H* pitch accent and an L−H% boundary tone work together to imply a contradiction, and that this contour has distinct effects from an L+H* L−L% tune. We also compare the online processing of changes in meaning sugges...

Adults are generally adept at recognizing familiar words in unfamiliar accents. However, studies testing young children’s abilities to cope with accent-related variation in the speech signal have generated mixed results, with some work emphasizing toddlers’ early competence and other work focusing more on their long-lasting difficulties in this domain. Here, we set out to unify these two perspe...

Understanding a sentence and integrating it into the discourse depends upon the identification of its focus, which, in spoken German, is marked by accentuation. In the case of written language, which lacks explicit cues to accent, readers have to draw on other kinds of information to determine the focus. We study the joint or interactive effects of two kinds of information that have no direct r...

We propose and test a new theory explaining glass-ceiling bias against nonnative speakers as driven by perceptions that nonnative speakers have weak political skill. Although nonnative accent is a complex signal, its effects on assessments of the speakers' political skill are something that speakers can actively mitigate; this makes it an important bias to understand. In Study 1, White and Asia...

Speech recognition has achieved great improvements recently. However, robustness is still one of the big problems, e.g. performance of recognition fluctuates sharply depending on the speaker, especially when the speaker has strong accent that is not covered in the training corpus. In this report, we first introduce our result on cross accent experiments and show a 30% error rate increase when a...