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...

Recent data suggest that the first presentation of a foreign accent triggers a delay in word identification, followed by a subsequent adaptation. This study examines under what conditions the delay resumes to baseline level. The delay will be experimentally induced by the presentation of sentences spoken to listeners in a foreign or a regional accent as part of a lexical decision task for words...

An accent adaptation approach using pronunciation variation modeling technology for Mandarin accent was proposed in this paper. As Chinese language is monosyllabic, the syllable pronunciation variation dictionary (SPVD) was built to depict the characteristics of accent. Firstly, the pronunciation modeling technology was utilized to get the context-independent and contextdependent accent-specifi...

A speaker’s accent is the most important factor affecting the performance of Natural Language Call Routing (NLCR) systems because accents vary widely, even within the same country or community. This variation also occurs when nonnative speakers start to learn a second language, the substitution of native language phonology being a common process. Such substitution leads to fuzziness between the...

PURPOSE The main aim of this experiment was to investigate the perception of Foreign Accent Syndrome in comparison to speakers with an authentic foreign accent. METHOD Three groups of listeners attributed accents to conversational speech samples of 5 FAS speakers which were embedded amongst those of 5 speakers with a real foreign accent and 5 native speaker controls. The listening panels diff...

In this paper, we propose an automatic method for detecting accent phrase boundaries in Japanese continuous speech by using F0 information. In the training phase, hand labeled accent patterns are parameterized according to a superpositional model proposed by Fujisaki, and assigned to some clusters by a clustering method, in which accent templates are calculated as centroid of each cluster. In t...