When synthesizing speech from Japanese text, correct assignment of accent nuclei for input text with arbitrary contents is indispensable in obtaining naturally-sounding synthetic speech. A phenomenon called accent sandhi occurs in utterances of Japanese; when a word is uttered in a sentence, its accent nucleus may change depending on the contexts of preceding/succeeding words. This paper descri...

The regular focus accent is determined by the syntactic structure of a sentence. In general, the distribution of the regular focus accent is regular in simple sentences. Some linguists had proposed some rules on the distribution of regular focus accent, but no experimental test yet. To improve the naturalness of the TTS system, it is very important to prove the rules of focus distribution and a...

Accented speech poses a challenge for listeners, particularly those with limited knowledge of their language. In a series of studies, we explored the possibility that experience with variability, specifically the variability provided by multiple accents, would facilitate infants' comprehension of speech produced with an unfamiliar accent. 15- and 18-month-old American-English learning infants w...

Standard Finland Swedish is often described as having Finnish-like intonation, with characteristic falling pitch accents. In this study, it is found that the falling pitch accent occurs with varying degrees of frequency in different Finland Swedish dialects, being most frequent in the dialects that have had the greatest amount of contact with Finnish, and less frequent (though in many cases sti...

This paper examines the manifestation of downstep and intonation in the Tokyo and Kochi dialects of Japanese by using three types of syntactically balanced material adjective phrases, adverbial phrases, and sentence modifiers. The main conclusion is that Kochi speakers produce a smaller Major Phrase consisting of fewer lexical accents than in the Tokyo dialect, the Major Phrase being defined as...

In particular, [2, 3, 4, 5] have argued that the referent of an accented pronoun is not in the immediate focus of attention, so the accent serves as a cue to its cognitive status. Empirical evaluations [6, 7] have found little support for these claims, although these studies could not investigate the potentially confounding influence of contrast, and suffered from insufficient or inadequate dat...

For adults, accent is an obvious indicator of a speaker's geographical background. The current study investigated whether preschoolers are sensitive to the relationship between background and accent. Experiment 1 shows that 3- to 5-year-olds believe that two speakers who share the same accent live in the same place but do not share the same personal preferences. Experiment 2 demonstrates that 4...

The recognition of familiar words was evaluated in 20-month-old children raised in a rhotic accent environment to parents that had either rhotic or non-rhotic accents. Using an Intermodal Preferential Looking task children were presented with familiar objects (e.g. 'bird') named in their rhotic or non-rhotic form. Children were only able to identify familiar words pronounced in a rhotic accent,...

It is well known that speaker variability caused by accent is one factor that degrades performance of speech recognition algorithms. If knowledge of speaker accent can be estimated accurately, then a modiied set of recognition models which addresses speaker accent could be employed to increase recognition accuracy. In this study, the problem of language accent classiication in American English ...