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...

Segmental factors can cause large temporal changes in local pitch contours associated with accented syllables (“accent curves”), but these changes are often not phonologically or perceptually significant. Yet, other factors can cause temporal changes that are smaller but nevertheless significant. We propose a model according to which accent curves are (phonologically, perceptually) equivalent w...

In two perception experiments on read German, we investigate how far different accent positions and accent types are related to degrees of perceived givenness both in sentences in isolation and in context. Results reveal a stepwise decrease in the degree of perceived givenness from deaccentuation and prenuclear accents through low and early peak nuclear accents to high and rising nuclear accent...

A 40-year-old, non-aphasic, right-handed, and polyglot (L1: French, L2: Dutch, and L3: English) woman with a 12-year history of addiction to opiates and psychoactive substances, and clear psychiatric problems, presented with a foreign accent of sudden onset in L1. Speech evolved toward a mostly fluent output, despite a stutter-like behavior and a marked grammatical output disorder. The psychoge...

The current study explores the potential influence of an L2 on the acquisition of L3, in the context of English speaking learners of Japanese (the L2) and Korean (the L3). As a mean to assess the degree of influence of the L1 accent and L2 accent in L3 production, an experiment involving the perceptual judgment of a foreign accent was developed. Two groups of native English speakers [(i) five w...

In this article, I will discuss the phenomenon of (linguistic) stress as it applies to words. Units that are larger than words (such as phrases and sentences) can be said to have stress too, but I will not touch on these larger units here. Right away, in section 2, I propose to shift our attention to the notion of accent, which I define as more fundamental than stress. Stress, as we will see, c...

Near-perfect atttomatic accent assignment is attainable,for citation-s~le speech, but better computational models art, needed to predict accent in extended, spontaneous discourses. This paper presents an empirically motivated theory of the discourse ]bcttsing nature of accent in spontaneous speech. Hypotheses based on this theory lead to a new approach to accent prediction, in which patterns o ...

A characteristic, though not necessary, property of so-called pitch accent languages is the existence of unaccented words. Work on unaccentedness in Japanese found a concentration of such words in very specific areas of the lexicon, defined in prosodic terms. While unaccentedness might be some kind of default, the prosodic rationale for the way it is distributed over the lexicon is far from cle...