Labelling speech sounds, i.e. classifying them into particular linguistic categories , can be influenced by several linguistic and extralinguistic factors, such as the emotional and physical condition of the speaker, the level of expertise and concentration of the labeller, and the quality and loudness of the recordings and labelling speech of children, non-native speakers or computers is more ...

Foreign accent syndrome FAS) is a motor speech disorder in which patients develop a speech accent which is notably different from their premorbid accent. This paper investigates the perceptual differences between speakers with FAS, speakers with a real foreign accent and a group of control speakers. From the results it appears that speakers with FAS are situated between the other groups at all ...

This essay showcases the results of a survey conducted on sample Italian speakers which focused their perception languages. The research, carried out in second half 2019, has enabled corroborating initial hypothesis about existence preconceptions and stereotypes associated with foreign languages cultures (Elman & McClelland 1986) by people. In particular, questionnaire was used to clarify a...

Recognition of foreign accented speech remains among the most difficult tasks in automatic speech recognition. It was observed that using models trained on foreign data together with native models improves the recognition for speakers with foreign accent. However such an approach degrades the recognition performances on native speakers. In order to avoid such performance degradation the degree ...

This paper provides the results of an acoustic study of Korean laryngeal stop production by eight adult native speakers each of Mandarin Chinese, American English, Seoul Korean, and Latin American Spanish. Three measurements were taken: f0 (fundamental frequency), VOT (Voice Onset Time), and H1-H2 (the relative amplitude of the first versus the second harmonic of the voice source). The data ind...

This study examines the coda voicing effect in English on production of preceding vowel by comparing L1 and L2 speech. Particular attention is paid to how coda voicing contrast is encoded in temporal vs. spectral dimensions, how the effect interacts with information structure (with varying focus types), and how the use of information structure differs in L1 vs. L2. Both English (native) and Kor...

The ability to learn second language speech sound categories declines during development. We examined this phenomenon by studying the mismatch negativity (MMN) to the /r/ - /l/ distinction in native English speakers and learners of English as a second language who are native speakers of Japanese. Previous studies have suggested that the MMN is remarkably plastic when evaluated as a waveform at ...

Perceptual voice judgment is a standard procedure in voice quality evaluation. However, the cultural and linguistic backgrounds of the judges often affect its reliability. Use of anchors has been shown to improve the reliability of the procedure. Therefore, this study aimed to develop female synthesized anchors in Cantonese, English, and Putonghua and investigate the reliability of perceptual v...

Neuropsychological studies in brain-injured patients with aphasia and children with specific language-learning deficits have shown the dependence of language comprehension on auditory processing abilities, i.e. the detection of temporal order. An impairment of temporal-order perception can be simulated by time reversing segments of the speech signal. In our study, we investigated how different ...

We are investigating unsupervised phone modeling. This paper describes a derivation method of VQ codebook sequences of variable length segments from spoken word samples, and also describes evaluation results by applying the method to mixed-lingual speech recognition tasks which include non-native speakers. The VQ codebook is generated based on a piecewise linear segmentation method which includ...