This paper deals with the problem of non-native accents in speech recognition. Reference tests were performed using whole-word and sub-word models trained either with a native accent or a pool of native and non-native accents. The results seem to indicate that the use of phonetic transcriptions for each speci c accent may improve recognition scores with sub-word models. A data-driven process is...

Pragmatic inferences require listeners to use alternatives to arrive at the speaker's intended meaning. Previous research has shown that intonation interacts with alternatives but not how it does so. We present two mouse tracking experiments that test how pitch accents affect the processing of ad hoc scalar implicatures in English. The first shows that L+H* accents facilitate implicatures relat...

The present paper reports on the impact of pitch accents and duration on temporal organisation of overlapping speech onsets in spontaneous dialogue. We observe a non-random pattern of overlap initiations within intervals between consecutive pitch accents, thus extending our earlier reports of a similar effect within vowel-to-vowel intervals. The latter finding was interpreted as a tendency to s...

This study investigated whether and how imitation of sentences spoken in Liverpool English (LE) and Standard Southern British English (SSBE), affected attitudes related to these accents. LE has low prestige and low social attractiveness, while SSBE has high prestige and high attractiveness. A previous study showed that imitation positively affects social attractiveness, but not prestige, for an...

It is well known that speaker variability caused by accent is an important factor in speech recognition. Some major accents in China are so different as to make this problem very severe. In this paper, we propose a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) based Mandarin accent identification method. In this method, a number of GMMs are trained to identify the most likely accent given test utterances. The i...

Speakers’ accents have been claimed to influence initial judgements of personality traits, such as trustworthiness. We examined how personal experience with specific accents may serve to modify initial trust attributions, using an iterated trust game in which participants make investments with virtual players. The virtual player’s accent was either Liverpool English or Standard Southern British...

The goal of this study is to explore the association between tonal accents and fundamental frequency parameters obtained from the Fujisaki model in Buenos Aires Spanish. Results indicate that three-syllable words in final position which are stressed on the third syllable are associated with early peaks. In non-final word accents, late peaks are found for words stressed in the first and second s...

In this paper I present the results of a production experiment testing the hypothesis that L*+H pre-nuclear pitch accents are indistinguishable in statements and questions in Greek. Results show that the L and the H tones of the L*+H pitch accent have different patterns of alignment in polar and in statements. These results suggest that the pitch accents are realized differently in the two utte...

When we engage in conversation, we use both verbal and non-verbal communication, including facial expressions. The latter have been investigated mainly in relation to the expression of emotion, but research into their connection with speech is still scarce. This is surprising, considering its relevance for psycholinguistic theories of speech production and for the development of multimodal comm...

Motivated by a desire to assess the prosody of foreign language learners, this study demonstrates the benefit of highlevel syntactic information in automatically deciding where phrase breaks and pitch accents should go in text. The connection between syntax and prosody is well-established, and naturally lends itself to tree-based probabilistic models. With automatically-derived parse trees pair...