Previous studies indicated that the rightmost unit is the default position for bearing nuclear accent in multiple-focus condition in Standard Chinese. The present research investigated the accent realization for dual-focus sentences which has a leftmost nuclear accent. The syntactic form of [Subject Verb (Modifier1) Object1 (Modifier2) Object2] was adopted. A corrective focus was always assigne...

This study investigates acoustic and articulatory correlates of South Swedish word accents (Accent 1 vs. 2) – a tonal distinction traditionally associated with F0 timing. The study is motivated by previous findings on (i) the acoustic complexity of tonal prosody and (ii) tonal-articulatory interplay in other languages. Acoustic and articulatory (EMA) data from two controlled experiments are rep...

In two speeded acceptability experiments we tested which combination of prenuclear accent, nuclear accent and f0interpolation between them is best suited to signal a double contrast in German (i.e., a contrastive topic followed by a contrastive focus). The experimental utterances differed in the prenuclear accent (medialvs. late-peak, i.e., L+H* vs. L*+H), the nuclear accent (earlyvs. medial-pe...

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...