The present paper is a first attempt to use the Fujisaki model to parameterize the F0 contours of utterances containing Accent 1 and Accent 2 tonal accents in Norwegian in different focus conditions. Differences in timing and amplitude of the accent commands are found, largely corresponding to descriptions in the literature. This shows that the model can be used as a basis for manipulating stim...

How early in life, and in what situations, are children sensitive to speakers’ accents? Some researchers have suggested that accent is an early-developing, perhaps intrinsic, signal of group membership. However, other studies find little sensitivity to or awareness of accent in young children. Three experiments reported here examine 3-5-yearolds’ comprehension of, and social decision-making wit...

1. Introduction The performance of speech recognition algorithms degrades considerably due to speaker variability. Aside from gender, the largest cause for speaker variability is accent. If the accent of a speaker can be determined automatically, then accent-specific speech recognition models can be used, thereby increasing speech recognition accuracy. In this study, the problem of accent class...

Does it matter if you speak with a regional accent? Speaking immediately reveals something of one's own social and cultural identity, be it consciously or unconsciously. Perceiving accents involves not only reconstructing such imprints but also augmenting them with particular attitudes and stereotypes. Even though we know much about attitudes and stereotypes that are transmitted by, e.g. skin c...

This paper examined the acoustic properties of the pitch accent of South Kyungsang Korean, focusing on generational differences. Kyungsang Korean has lexical pitch accents, whereas standard Seoul Korean does not. However, whether the pitch accents are maintained by younger Kyungsang speakers is questionable given the influence of Seoul Korean. Through comparisons between older and younger speak...

Accents provide information about the speaker's geographical, socio-economic, and ethnic background. Research in applied psychology and sociolinguistics suggests that we generally prefer our own accent to other varieties of our native language and attribute more positive traits to it. Despite the widespread influence of accents on social interactions, educational and work settings the neural un...

Speech carries accent information relevant to determining the speaker's linguistic and social background. A series of web-based experiments demonstrate that accent cues can modulate access to word meaning. In Experiments 1-3, British participants were more likely to retrieve the American dominant meaning (e.g., hat meaning of "bonnet") in a word association task if they heard the words in an Am...

The robust “accent culture” of English-language speech in the Irish Republic provides an opportunity to explore the concept of verbal taboo in terms of non-referential indexical function (in this case, phonological variants). The paper documents an ongoing moral panic of language in Irish society, centering on a new and fashionable accent of Irish English. This new accent, termed “D4” (after th...

The accent was proved to be the essential links between linguistics and acoustics, and behaves as an important parameter for prosody processing and unit selection in speech synthesis system. In the paper, some acoustical measurements are carried out on F0, duration, silence in order to disclose the relationship between accent and corresponding acoustical parameters. The normalized acoustic para...