This paper investigates the effects of contrastive focal accent placement on lingual articulation and coarticulation of French [kskl] clusters in word-medial position. The EPG results show that (i) this type of accent does not systematically increase the amplitude, but the duration of linguopalatal constrictions (particularly their release); (ii) i t directly lengthens the temporal interval bet...

The automatic identification of prosodic events such as pitch accent in English has long been a topic of interest to speech researchers, with applications to a variety of spoken language processing tasks. However, much remains to be understood about the best methods for obtaining high accuracy detection. We describe experiments examining the optimal domain for accent analysis. Specifically, we ...

In a nonword serial recall experiment we found following results: (1) Phonotactically high frequent nonwords were recalled better than low ones in terms of phoneme accuracy; (2) but this phonotactic frequency effect was not observed in accent accuracy. (3) Accent typicality did not have an expected effect on phoneme recall accuracy; (4) but it had an effect on accent accuracy. These results sug...

Tokyo Japanese has a lexical pitch-accent system whereas Seoul Korean features no wordlevel tonal representations. The present study investigated phonological perception of lexical pitch-accent by advanced Seoul Korean learners of Japanese, via sequence-recall experiments. The results, on the contrary to our prediction, showed that advanced Korean learners performed as well as native Japanese s...

Listeners must cope with a great deal of variability in the speech signal, and thus theories of speech perception must also account for variability, which comes from a number of sources, including variation between accents. It is well known that there is a processing cost when listening to speech in an accent other than one's own, but recent work has suggested that this cost is reduced when lis...

The formant space of three major English accents namely British, American and Australian are modelled and used for accent conversion. Accent synthesis, through modification of the acoustic parameters of speech, provides a means for assessing the perceptual contribution of each parameter on conveying an accent. An improved method based on a linear prediction (LP) model feature analysis and a 2-D...

A well-known factor affecting sentence prosody is Information Structure, including the givenness vs. newness of the information conveyed by a constituent. In many languages, givenness is expressed prosodically either by deaccentuation (e.g. [1]) or by a less prominent realisation of the accent, which may be achieved either by phonological means like accent type (e.g. [2]), or by phonetic means ...

In this paper, we proposed to use the Fujisaki parameter to distinguish between declarative and interrogative intonation in Indonesian speech. Four combinations of Fujisaki parameter were selected as the features to distinguish between declarative and interrogative intonation. The first combination is only the amplitude of last accent command. The second combination consists of the amplitude of...

In this paper we investigate whether it is possible to combine speech data from two South African accents of English in order to improve speech recognition in any one accent. Our investigation is based on Afrikaans-accented English and South African English speech data. We compare three acoustic modelling approaches: separate accent-specific models, accentindependent models obtained by straight...

Realizing expressive text-to-speech synthesis needs both text processing and the rendering of natural expressive speech. This paper focuses on the former as a front-end task in the production of synthetic speech, and investigates a novel method for predicting emphasized accent phrases from advertisement text information. For this purpose, we examine features that can be accurately extracted by ...