A read speech corpus was collected in order to study the tonal targets alignment of two Pisa Italian peak accents. The production of the two accents was forced by inducing a broad and a contrastive interpretation of the target words inserted in small paragraphs. Results of latency and F0 measurements reveal that the contrastive accent has a low target at a 'fixed' distance after the peak wherea...

1. INTRODUCTION. The distribution of pitch accents in speech is a topic of long-standing importance because it reflects the relationships among different levels of representation: phonology, syntax, semantics, and information structure. The broad tendency for accents to be located on new information is a classic observation, but formalizing the principles that govern accent placement in all cas...

Individuals who violate expectations increase uncertainty during social interactions. Three experiments explored whether expectancy-violating partners engender "threat" responses in perceivers. Participants interacted with confederates who violated or confirmed expectations while multiple measures were assessed, including cardiovascular reactivity, task performance, appraisals, and behavior. In...

In perceptual experiments, quantitative manipulation of acoustic features in speech material is often required. And obviously, it can be realized only with speech synthesis techniques. Some of the authors have conducted a series of perceptual experiments, through which they have felt necessity of a system to generate more natural speech. With these backgrounds, a speech stimuli generation syste...

Automatic dialog systems tested with naive users are often confronted with special speaking styles, as e.g. words produced with emphatic or contrastive accent. Such utterances usually cause problems for word recognizers, because they were not included in the training data. It is thus important for the improvement of future systems to be able to collect utterances containing contrastive accents ...

The current paper addresses the effect of auditory and visual information on the perception of accents. The research consists of two perception experiments in which we present video clips of recorded speakers as stimuli to listeners. The first experiment tests whether listeners can detect the accented syllable in a sequence of three nonsense syllables, which are presented to subjects in three c...

The goal of this paper was to determine whether there is a formal difference between high-ending nuclear (IP-final) and prenuclear accents in French. After transcribing the relevant items, we then compared the different accentual and phrasal categories by analyzing, among the other things, the tonal and temporal characteristics of their tonal targets as well as durational characteristics of the...

This paper descirbes a technique for finding intonatioanl events, (pitch accents and boundary tones) from waveforms. The technique works in a bottom-up manner by using a recurrent neural network to perform a classification of each frame in the input waveform. An autosegmental description, consisting of intonational events, syllables and the links between them, is then produced from this frame-b...

As an example of complex auditory signal processing, the analysis of accented speech is potentially vulnerable in the progressive aphasias. However, the brain basis of accent processing and the effects of neurodegenerative disease on this processing are not well understood. Here we undertook a detailed neuropsychological study of a patient, AA with progressive nonfluent aphasia, in whom agnosia...