A characteristic, though not necessary, property of so-called pitch accent languages is the existence of unaccented words. Work on unaccentedness in Japanese found a concentration of such words in very specific areas of the lexicon, defined in prosodic terms. While unaccentedness might be some kind of default, the prosodic rationale for the way it is distributed over the lexicon is far from cle...

The present paper presents the results of a cross-language analysis with 10 L1 German speakers who have learned Swedish for at least 18 months. In an imitation and a perception experiment they had to produce and identify the Swedish word accents in the first post-focal position. 15 L1 Swedish speakers took part in the same perception experiment and also evaluated the imitations of the L1 German...

Screening of 488 Syrian unaccompanied minor refugees (< 18 years-old) in Berlin showed low prevalence of intestinal parasites (Giardia, 7%), positive schistosomiasis serology (1.4%) and absence of hepatitis B. Among 44 ill adult Syrian refugees examined at GeoSentinel clinics worldwide, cutaneous leishmaniasis affected one in three patients; other noteworthy infections were active tuberculosis ...

Correspondence Besides the issue of the uniqueness of the dialect change, Kwon and Kim [1] also point out that the patient observed a sustained infarct in the temporoparietal area resulting in a prosodic change and fluent aphasia. FAS occurring after a posteriorly located le-sion is indeed rare but has been reported before. Aside from Roth et al. [8] , we would like to refer to a study by Lippe...

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...