Understanding a sentence and integrating it into the discourse depends upon the identification of its focus, which, in spoken German, is marked by accentuation. In the case of written language, which lacks explicit cues to accent, readers have to draw on other kinds of information to determine the focus. We study the joint or interactive effects of two kinds of information that have no direct r...

We propose and test a new theory explaining glass-ceiling bias against nonnative speakers as driven by perceptions that nonnative speakers have weak political skill. Although nonnative accent is a complex signal, its effects on assessments of the speakers' political skill are something that speakers can actively mitigate; this makes it an important bias to understand. In Study 1, White and Asia...

Speech recognition has achieved great improvements recently. However, robustness is still one of the big problems, e.g. performance of recognition fluctuates sharply depending on the speaker, especially when the speaker has strong accent that is not covered in the training corpus. In this report, we first introduce our result on cross accent experiments and show a 30% error rate increase when a...

Declaration By submitting this thesis electronically, I declare that the entirety of the work contained therein is my own, original work, that I am the sole author thereof (save to the extent explicitly otherwise stated), that reproduction and publication thereof by Stellenbosch University will not infringe any third party rights and that I have not previously in its entirety or in part submitt...

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...