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...

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. ...

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...

The production of speech involves an individual’s control of their various articulators (lips, tongue, larynx etc.) to produce auditory speech signals [1]. These movements can be utilised in the processing of visual speech and form the basis of speechreading. However, the production of speech by different talkers can be variable; physiology, accent and speech rate can all change the appearance ...

Accent is cited as an issue for speech recognition systems [1]. Research has shown that accent mismatch between the training and the test data will result in significant accuracy reduction in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. Using HMM based ASR trained on a standard English accent, our study shows that the error rates can be up to seven times higher for accented speech, than for stan...

this article addresses the phonetic and phonological representation of h- phrase accent in the tonal structure of persian pre-nuclear accents. in an experimental study, three groups of pre-nuclear accentual phrases, namely, phrases with antepenultimate, penultimate and final stress pattern, were selected for tonal examination. materials were designed so as to yield under-pressure and pressure f...