The present paper examines the effect of pragmatic focus on the realisation of the lexical pitch accent contrast in the Trøndersk variety of Norwegian. Target disyllabic words with accent 1 and accent 2 were read with broad and narrow focus by 10 native speakers of Trøndersk. Broad-to-narrow focus changes were implemented through an expanded pitch range and vowel lengthening for both accents. A...

Contrastive topic is an information structural category that is usually associated with a specific intonation, which tends to be similar across languages (a rising pitch accent). The aim of the present study is to examine whether this also true of Estonian. Three potential prosodic correlates of contrastive topics are examined: marking with a particular pitch accent type, an emphatic realizatio...

In this paper, we present a study on robust speech recognition with respect to accent variations. Differences that characterize accents in speech can be divided into two parts: phonetic and acoustic. We focus on the acoustic differences and the ways of acoustic model design and training that can be used to minimize the effect of accent variations on the speech recognition system’s performance. ...

Standard grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) systems are trained using a homogeneous lexicon, for example one associated with a particular accent. In practice, a synthesis system may be required to handle multiple accents. Furthermore, a speaker rarely has a pure accent; accents vary continuously within and between regions of a country. Generating phonetic sequences for each accent is possible, but combi...

We present a study where we examined the influence of a regional accent in the perception of voice and/or speech disorders. These aspects are most of the time overshadowed in clinical context. This protocol, involving multiple sources of speech variations, is also interesting for perception theories. For the experiment, speakers with or without a Southern French accent and with or without speec...

This paper is concerned with automatic speech recognition (ASR) for accented speech. Given a small amount of speech from a new speaker, is it better to apply speaker adaptation to the baseline, or to use accent identification (AID) to identify the speaker’s accent and select an accent-dependent acoustic model? Three accent-based model selection methods are investigated: using the ‘true’ accent ...

This study examined how four- to five-year-olds and seven- to eight-year-olds used intonation (accent placement and accent type) to encode topic and focus in Dutch. Naturally spoken declarative sentences with either sentence-initial topic and sentence-final focus or sentence-initial focus and sentence-final topic were elicited via a picture-matching game. Results showed that the four- to five-y...

Accentuation serves to express both the discrete information concerning the accent type of a prosodic word and the continuous information concerning its prominence. This paper examines the latter aspect of accentuation using recorded radio news read by announcers. The amplitude of the accent command was extracted from anF0 contour and used as an index for the level of accentuation. Statistical ...

This study investigates the acoustic characteristics of non-native speech which give rise to the perception of a foreign accent. Japanese speech samples were collected from L1 English and Mandarin speakers studying Japanese. The acoustic patterns of the L2 and native speech were related to the accentedness ratings of the speech provided by native Japanese listeners. Results indicate the importa...