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...

Lexical pitch accent languages such as Swedish and Japanese have been claimed to exhibit variation in phonological inventory and/or phonetic manifestation of pitch accents. This paper reports variations in the phonetic manifestation as well as phonological patterning of the lexical H*+L pitch accent in two Ryukyuan dialects – Shuri and Nakijin. The F0 manifestation of H*+L pitch accent in the t...

This paper explicitly provides the experimental analyses for the fundamental arguments of Kyungsang (KS) tone. It provides the locations of the main accent in KS words and its basic tonal units. Furthermore through the results it ultimately contributes to the typological categorization of KS Korean tone. That is, the results of the current experimental analysis of the KS words provide us the ev...

MAGE enables the reactive and continuous models modification in the HMM-based speech synthesis framework. Here, we present our first prototype system for extended interpolation applied for interactive accent control. Available accent models for American, Canadian and British English are manipulated in realtime by means of a gesturally controlled interactive geographical map. The accent interpol...

As an example of complex auditory signal processing, the analysis of accented speech is potentially vulnerable in the progressive aphasias. However, the brain basis of accent processing and the effects of neurodegenerative disease on this processing are not well understood. Here we undertook a detailed neuropsychological study of a patient, AA with progressive nonfluent aphasia, in whom agnosia...

In the intonation of polar questions in the Northern Russian dialect of Varzuga (Kola Peninsula), two different intonation patterns are frequently used: the Standard Russian H*L pitch accent, with a high rise and immediate fall, but also a “broad hat” pattern, in which the high rise is followed by a late fall, aligned to the first syllable after the last lexical stress. This contour does not fi...

This paper presents an articulatory synthesis method to transform utterances from a second language (L2) learner to appear as if they had been produced by the same speaker but with a native (L1) accent. The approach consists of building a probabilistic articulatory synthesizer (a mapping from articulators to acoustics) for the L2 speaker, then driving the model with articulatory gestures from a...

Recent research has shown that infants and young children up to the age of 5 years are more likely to imitate in-group members than out-group members. Cues like gender, race, age, and language are robust indicators for social categories and, thus, for group membership. Concerning imitation, research mainly focuses on language and accent, whereas race indicated by physical appearance is rarely i...

Most English text-to-speech synthesisers offer one of only two accents: General American or RP. Developing a new accent is laborious, since it is not possible to choose one accent as a base form and systematically translate to others. We use the approach of Wells ([1]), categorising vowels in terms of abstract keywords that encode classes of words. Thus it is unnecessary to use a phonemic trans...