The article investigates the phonetic and phonological property of focal accents conveyed by disyllabic focused words with various tonal combinations in Standard Chinese. Phonetically, the effect of focal accents upon f0 resides in two aspects: the manner and the condition of focal accents. Phonologically, the distribution of focal accents is mainly concerned. Acoustic and perceptual experiment...

Sequential distributions of intonational pitch accents in a hand-labelled, read speech corpus of Tuscan Italian are analysed in relation to (1) the global frequencies of accents; (2) evidence of consistent patterns of association between accents. A subset of syntactically controlled nominal phrases are examined to determine whether the fact of their constituting a coherent syntactic unit has an...

Accents are local events that attract a listener’s attention and are either evident from the score (immanent) or added by the performer (performed). Immanent accents are associated with grouping, meter, melody, and harmony. In piano music, performed accents involve changes in timing, dynamics, articulation, and pedaling; they vary in amplitude, form, and duration. Performers tend to “bring out”...

This paper proposes a method for the measurement and quantification of the impact of accents on speech models. An accent metric is introduced based on the cross entropy (CE) of the probability models of speech from different accents. The CE metric has potentials for use in analysis, identification, quantification and ranking of the salient features of accents. The accent metric is used for phon...

Speakers may use pitch accents as pointers to new information, or as signals of a contrast relation between the accented item and a limited set of alternatives. There is no consensus in the literature whether a separately identi able contrastive accent exists. Some studies report that contrastive accents are more emphatic than newness accents and have a di erent melodic shape. In other studies,...

The number of (free) fonts prepared with METAFONT is surprisingly small compared, e.g., to what is available in the commercial market in other formats. Well, perhaps not so surprisingly: METAFONT generates TEX-oriented bitmap fonts which have not become popular outside the TEX world. Accepting this irksome situation as a challenge, we have prepared METAType1, a package for generating fonts in t...

This paper compares and quantifies the differences between formants of speech across accents. The cross entropy information measure is used to compare the differences between the formants of the vowels of three major English accents namely British, American and Australian. An improved formant estimation method, based on a linear prediction (LP) model feature analysis and a hidden Markov model (...

This paper compares and quantifies the differences between formants of speech across accents. The cross entropy information measure is used to compare the differences between the formants of the vowels of three major English accents namely British, American and Australian. An improved formant estimation method, based on a linear prediction (LP) model feature analysis and a hidden Markov model (...