Abstract Multi-accent environments offer rich but inconsistent language input, as words are produced differently across accents. The current study examined, in two experiments, whether multi-accent variability affects infants’ ability to learn and toddlers’ prior experience with accents modulates learning. In Experiment 1, two-and-a-half-year-old Norwegian toddlers were exposed, their kindergar...

Listeners perceptually assimilate nonnative phones to native phonemes, but do they do so with unfamiliar accents of their own language? We assessed Australian (Aus) listeners’ assimilation of vowels in two unfamiliar English accents, and whether prior short-term exposure to the other accent would yield any adaptation to its vowels. Participants categorized the vowels of nonce words spoken in Au...

The expression of nonverbal cues may differ systematically across cultures. Common cues used in distinct ways cross-culturally may be termed nonverbal accents. The data in this study indicate that nonverbal accents can help perceivers to distinguish the nationality of expressers. In Study 1, American participants could determine the nationality of Australian and American adults with above-chanc...

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...

The Trøndersk dialect of East Norwegian is rather unusual typologically in that it exhibits a tonal contrast (unmarked vs. circumflex) on monosyllabic words [7, 1, 20]. The goal of the current study was to examine this contrast and how it is impacted by sentential focus. Ten speakers of the Trøndersk dialect were recorded reading target monosyllabic words with these accents embedded in sentence...

Because of the elusive nature of pitch accents and prosodic phrasing, the role of prosody has been neglected too often in the description of the syntax-phonology interface. This paper shows that the syntactic structure of German sentences is shaped by the formation of prosodic phrases, and that many puzzles are solved if prosodic phrasing and accents are systematically considered in formal gram...

There have been significant improvements in automatic voice recognition technology. However, existing systems still face difficulties, particularly when used by non-native speakers with accents. In this paper we address a problem of identifying the English accented speech of speakers from different backgrounds. Once an accent is identified the speech recognition software can utilise training se...

This paper presents a comparative study on the temporal alignment of pitch peaks of H*L accents in Polish and German. Speech material used in the study came from the unit selection synthesis corpora of the Polish voice module of the BOSS system and the IMS German Festival TTS system. The major factors investigated were concerned with the influence of syllable structure on the one hand, as well ...

In an ongoing corpus study we have found that polar questions in American English tend to be low rising, characterized by a low final pitch accent followed by a rise to the end of the utterance. A study of a minority pattern of questions with a high final pitch accent followed by a rise reveals that such pitch accents often fall on a type of word that is typically unaccented, thus raising the q...

1 PROLOGUE What is the meaning of contrastive accents in dialogue? To answer this question, a number of hurdles have to be taken. To begin with, there is still no consensus in the prosodic literature whether a separately identifiable contrastive intonation exists in the first place. So, before we can even begin to answer the initial question, we have to try and answer a different question: do d...