We used a corpus of collaborative task oriented dialogues in American English to compare two units of rhythmic structure – pitch accents and syllables – within the coupled oscillator model of rhythmical entrainment in turn-taking proposed in [1]. We found that pitch accents are a slightly better fit than syllables as the unit of rhythmical structure for the model, but we also observed weak supp...

Spoken languages are often rich in regional accents and dialects. These local variations often pose challenges to automatic speech recognition. In this study, we analyse the influence of German regional accents on the performance of a large vocabulary continuous speech recogniser trained on standard German data. The experiments show a large variation in the error rate over different regions. We...

our goal in this article examine the challenges facing the arabic language and the hiring extent of their impact in the arab and promoted by the enemies of islam and haters and orientalists and case westernized to replace accent in formal arabic.                         this is assumed to be have faced many of arab challenges of globalization and to advocate slang and accents by some orientalis...

The Neoštokavian dialect of Croatian belongs to the somewhat obscure category of pitch accent languages,1 making use of both tone and another type of prominence, usually termed stress, in wordlevel prosody (Babić, 1988; van der Hulst & Smith, 1988; Bethin, 1994; Inkelas & Zec, 1988; Zec, 1992, 1999). The interaction between tone and stress yields four accents, traditionally called long falling ...

This paper describes the use of a unit selection corpus in carrying out an investigation of factors influencing specific aspects of the phonetic realization of tonal categories, concentrating on the alignment of peaks in H*L pitch accents in German. Three major linguistic parameters potentially influencing peak alignment are investigated. Two of them (syllable structure, nuclear pitch accents) ...

The paper reports on a perception experiment in German investigating the relative prominence of target words in two positions in a sentence. Listeners judged for each position which of four prominence levels were perceived as accented or unaccented. While subjects clearly distinguished between strongly accented and unaccented (i.e. postlexically stressed and unstressed) words in both positions,...

The model to be used depends on what our students want to use and what we are able to provide as teachers. Most AMEP clients are aiming to settle in Australia, and many AMEP teachers speak some variety of Australian English, and so this is a reasonable model for the AMEP. But familiarity with other accents – so-called native (eg New Zealand, British) and non-native (eg Chinese, German) – is als...

In this study Hidden Markov models are employed for the automatic classiication of pitch accents in German utterances. A sim-pliied version of the tone sequence model (i.e. a linguistic theory of pitch accents) is applied. In this approach only two of the nuclear tones (rise, fall) are used. They are represented by continuous density Hidden Markov models. The classiier works on the sequence of ...

Human listeners can almost instantaneously judge whether or not another speaker is part of their speech community. The basis of this judgment is the speaker’s accent. Even though humans judge speech accents with ease, it has been tremendously difficult to automatically evaluate and rate accents in any consistent manner. This paper describes an experiment using the Amazon Mechanical Turk to deve...