This paper discusses the effects of tonal clash (or strict adjacency between two accents) on the phonetic realization of H* accents in Catalan. The analysis of the data shows that the adjacency of two rising accents triggers a drastic temporal reorganization of the Fo gestures involved, resulting in anticipation of the first gesture and delay of the second. Specifically, in crowded tonal enviro...

This article reports on the relationship between the English variable (ING) and two divergent accents (Southern and gay) as they are conceptualized and given social meaning in listeners’ perceptions of spontaneous speech. The study used an expanded form of the Matched Guise Technique, using recordings collected through sociolinguistic interviews with 8 speakers from North Carolina and Californi...

The present paper presents the results of a cross-language analysis with 10 L1 German speakers who have learned Swedish for at least 18 months. In an imitation and a perception experiment they had to produce and identify the Swedish word accents in the first post-focal position. 15 L1 Swedish speakers took part in the same perception experiment and also evaluated the imitations of the L1 German...

Earlier findings in Shue et al. (2007, 2008) raised questions about the alignment of nuclear pitch accents in American English, which are addressed here by eliciting both high and low pitch accents in two different target words in several different positions in a single-phrase utterance (early, late but not final, and final) from 20 speakers (10 male, 10 female). Results show that the F0 peak a...

The morphosyntactic nature of word accents in Swedish makes them a perfect candidate for the study of predictive processing in language. The association of word stem accents with upcoming suffixes allows native listeners to pre-activate a word's potential ending and thereby facilitate speech processing. Unlike native speakers, second language learners are known to be less able to use prediction...

The effect of accent [pronunciation of speech sounds determined by a speaker’s regional or national location] on auditory speech comprehension has been well documented, but research is lacking as to its effects on visual speech understanding. In order to address this, the present study examined the effect of regional accent variation on speechreading performance. The aim was to determine if fam...

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...

This study investigates how Mandarin Chinese (MC) speakers learn English pitch accents under the influence of L1 prosody system. Based on Speech Learning Model (SLM), it is hypothesized that MC speakers will produce H* better than L* since MC speakers tend to associate stressed syllables with higher pitch. Another hypothesis is that MC speakers will produce pitch accents better in the sentence-...

This paper focuses on foreign accent characterisation and identi cation in French. How many accents may a native French speaker recognise and which cues does (s)he use? Our interest concentrates on French productions stemming from speakers of six di erent mother tongues: Arabic, English, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, also compared with native French speakers. Using automatic speech p...