Through tight collaboration with teachers of Japanese, an online accent dictionary and a reading tutor are developed to support teaching and learning of Japanese prosody. In this development, techniques of natural language processing and spoken language processing are effectively applied. What makes teaching and learning of Japanese accent difficult is the fact that word accent of Japanese ofte...

Accented speech conveys important nonverbal information about the speaker as well as presenting the brain with the problem of decoding a non-canonical auditory signal. The processing of non-native accents has seldom been studied in neurodegenerative disease and its brain basis remains poorly understood. Here we investigated the processing of non-native international and regional accents of Engl...

this study has been derived from my doctorate thesis entitled as ‘’al derasate val tahghigh hula area alsarfie val nahvie leibn geni fi ketabeh al khasaes’’ which while expressing a little about life and literature of ibne geni, explain the subject of accent variations in terms of meaning and structure. it is believed that ibn geni in 321 (h-gh) was born in mousel. some believe that his name ha...

Accent morphing aims to modify the accent of a speaker whilst maintaining speaker identity. A textindependent approach could be based on voice conversion systems which manipulate speaker identity through spectral mapping. However, it is not clear to what extent accent changes can be captured with spectral mapping alone. In this paper we implement and evaluate a text-dependent accent morphing sy...

Humans imitate each other during social interaction. This imitative behavior streamlines social interaction and aids in learning to replicate actions. However, the effect of imitation on action comprehension is unclear. This study investigated whether vocal imitation of an unfamiliar accent improved spoken-language comprehension. Following a pretraining accent comprehension test, participants w...

In Japanese, every content word has its own mora-based H/L pitch pattern when it is uttered in isolation, called accent type. When reading out a written sentence, however, this lexical H/L pattern is often changed according to the context, known as word accent sandhi. In our previous work, an accent sandhi predictor was developed using CRF [1], and in this paper, the predictor is improved throu...

There is a systematic relationship between stress accent and vocalic identity in spontaneous English discourse (the Switchboard corpus of telephone dialogues). Low vowels are much more likely to be fully accented than their high vocalic counterparts. And conversely, high vowels are far more likely to lack stress accent than low or mid vocalic segments. Such patterns imply that stress accent and...

This paper reports the results of research on the process of acquisition of Japanese compound accent rules by children aged 4-5. The results reveal: 1) Children acquire genera1 rules before they acquire lexical idiosyncratic rules. 2) Children failed to retain the accent of the second element, and instead place an incorrect accent on the penultimate foot. This result suggests that children acqu...

When developing Japanese text-to-speech (TTS) systems, algorithms to accurately predict accent types of each constituent phrase is essential for better output speech quality. In our previous studies on the accent type estimation, a CRF-based method was realized. Although this method outperformed the conventional rule-based method, the estimation accuracy of particular phrases such as those incl...