Listeners' aesthetic and emotional responses to music typically occur in the context of long musical passages that contain structures defined in terms of the events that precede them. We describe an electrophysiological study of listeners' brain responses to musical accents that coincided in longer musical sequences. Musically trained listeners performed a timbre-change detection task in which ...

In intonation languages, the realization of pitch accents varies with the application of phonetic e!ects such as &&truncation'' and &&compression''. These e!ects can change the surface form of accents but do not a!ect the inventory of phonological contrasts. Cross-linguistic di!erences in the application of truncation and compression have been attested for the standard varieties of English and ...

COMPOSITIONAL approaches to mobile accentuation of the Indo-European type derive the accent of words from the lexically specified accentual features of their constituent morphemes, together with the BASIC ACCENTUATION PRINCIPLE (BAP), which erases all accents but the leftmost one, and assigns an accent to the left edge of an unaccented domain.1 I propose here a compositional analysis in which B...

This project shows that focus and information structure, as indicated by the particle “only” pitch accents, influence syntactic attachment, in contrast to well-known effects of prosodic boundaries on attachment. One written questionnaire, one completion study, several auditory questionnaires show position strongly affects attachment preferences ambiguous sentences, while contrastive accents hav...

This article investigates the perceptual effect of a high plateau in the intonation contour. Plateaux are flat stretches of contour and have been observed associated with high tones in Standard Southern British (SSB) English. The hypothesis that plateaux may make the accents with which they are associated sound higher in pitch than sharp peaks of the same maximum frequency is tested experimenta...

Previous work has shown that both the speed and accuracy of word recognition can be reduced if a talker has a regional or non-native accent, particularly under noisy conditions. This study investigated whether the reduced intelligibility of some accents in noise are related to aspects of speech processing in quiet. Our goal was to see if difficulties processing accented speech under adverse lis...

Speech accents can possess valuable information about the speaker that can be used in intelligent multimedia-based human-computer interfaces. The performance of algorithms for automatic classification of accents is often evaluated using audio datasets that include recording samples of different people, representing different accents. Here we describe a method that can detect bias in accent data...

Infant-directed speech exhibits slower speech rate, higher pitch and larger f0 excursions than adult-directed speech. Apart from these phonetic properties established in many languages, little is known on the intonational phonological structure in individual languages, i.e. pitch accents and boundary tones and their frequency distribution. Here, we investigated the intonation of infant-directed...

The current paper investigates the nominal pitch accent system in South Kyungsang Korean through an acoustic study and presents a phonological analysis for the system based on the acoustic results. The data were collected from fourmale South Kyungsang speakers by recording monosyllabic and disyllabic nouns with various types of suffixes. The pitch results confirmed the accent distinctions repor...