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This paper looks at the variability of pitch accent realisations on different word types in relation to the relative frequency with which each word type occurs with a particular pitch accent type (among all pitch-accented occurrences of the word). Results indicate that pitch accent realisation variability decreases with increasing relative frequency. This is consistent with Exemplar Theory: rel...

We conducted a longitudinal study on the effectiveness of shadowing training for Chinese and Mongolian learners of Japanese. The purpose of the present study was to clarify (1) the effect of longitudinal shadowing training for realization of pitch accent, and (2) to discuss if the difference of effectiveness depends on the learners’ proficiency level as well as their first language. 15 Japanese...

This study reports the first results of a research aimed to investigate how segmental variation is conditioned by prosody in Italian, by examining the acoustic and articulatory properties of syllables that are prominent at different levels of the prosodic hierarchy. We examined lip movement kinematics of unstressed, stressed and nuclearly accented syllables in order to understand the kinematic ...

To highlight relevant information in dialogues, both wh-question context and pitch accent in answers can be used, such that focused information gains more attention and is processed more elaborately. To evaluate the relative influence of context and pitch accent on the depth of semantic processing, we measured event-related potentials (ERPs) to auditorily presented wh-question-answer pairs. A s...

The present contribution summarises event-related potential (ERP) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) findings related to the processing of Swedish word accents in speech comprehension. It has previously been seen that word accents – either a low tone (accent 1) or a high tone (accent 2) on a word stem – can be used to pre-activate suffixes. Furthermore, it has been found that acce...

The current study examines the relationship between intonational gestures as given by the accent commands of the Fujisaki model and the syllabic grid on the example of spontaneous American English from the Buckeye Corpus. As an initial step the data were labelled according to American English ToBI conventions. Intensity contours were extracted from the band-filtered speech signal and modelled u...

some linguists believe that word in arabic language was initially based on one syllabus; orators have changed them according to the special countries, tribes and societies. they have contrived special acumen for any prefixes, suffixes and affixes addition. some other linguists believed that word was initially formed based on three letters, and thus different accents and languages were ramified ...

The present paper describes a case of late pitch peak placement in West Swedish. In the Swedish prosodic typology this dialect type belongs to the double-peaked dialects, where the first pitch peak of a word in focus represents word accent proper and the second peak focal accent. In phrase-final position the focal accent H appears to seek the edge of the phrase, while in nonfinal position it se...

This study investigated how L2 experience modulates L1-L2 talker-listener intelligibility. L1 southern British English (SE) and L1 French listeners with varying L2 experience (Inexperienced ‘FI’, Experienced ‘FE’ and Bilinguals) were tested on their speech-in-noise recognition of English sentences that were spoken with a range of accents (SE, FI, FE, Northern Irish and Korean-accented English)....