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...

The present study deals with the in uence of syllable structure on the the ne alignment of accent commands of the Fujisaki-model. The corpus used in this study consists of three-syllable words of German with word-accent on the second syllable which were uttered in citationform. It is examined which factors in uence accent command onset time T1 and accent command o set time T2. T1 can be predict...

This contribution faces the ToBI accent recognition problem with the goal of multiclass identification vs. the more conservative Accent vs. No Accent approach. A neural network and a decision tree are used for automatic recognition of the ToBI accents in the Boston Radio Corpus. Multiclass classification results show the difficulty of the problem and the impact of imbalanced classes. A study of...

This is a study about the accent pattern of compound words in the Southern Swedish variety. This pattern differs from Standard Swedish in that the first element of the compound may retain Accent I, whereas the standard dialect invariably gets Accent II. Bruce (1974) showed that this accent shift blocking varied with area and type of compound. The present study deals with four dialects of Southe...