Pitch accent realization requires voicing by its nature. However, high vowels are sometimes devoiced even though the vowel carries a pitch accent in Tokyo Japanese. This devoicing, then, would obliterate the pitch accent were it not for other e ects which preserve the presence and location of the accent. Previous studies showed that when the accented vowel is devoiced, there is either a pitch r...

Lesion-symptom mapping studies reveal that selective damage to one or more components of the speech production network can be associated with foreign accent syndrome, changes in regional accent (e.g., from Parisian accent to Alsatian accent), stronger regional accent, or re-emergence of a previously learned and dormant regional accent. Here, we report loss of regional accent after rapidly regre...

A computational modeling study was conducted using multinomial logistic regression to predict whether exposure to an unfamiliar regional accent of English would influence vowel categorization in (1) the exposure accent, (2) the native accent, and (3) another unfamiliar accent. We manipulated the number of talkers in the exposure data to determine whether talker variability influenced the effica...

This paper considers whether the phonology of the lexical pitch accent of Kyungsang Korean is being maintained by younger innovative speakers. We examine the pitch-accent patterns of nouns with various suffixes by comparing the speech of innovative Kyungsang speakers to that of older conservative speakers. It will be shown that while innovative speakers maintain the underlying distinction in th...

Communication in English increasingly involves non-native speakers. Such speakers can speak English with different degrees of non-native accentedness. In order to contribute to insights into the effects that these differences in accentedness can have on listeners, the current study systematically reviews experimental studies into the effects of degrees of foreign accentedness in English. It pre...

Speaker accent is an important issue in the formulation of robust speaker independent recognition systems. Knowledge gained from a reliable accent classification approach could improve overall recognition performance. In this paper, a new algorithm is proposed for foreign accent classification of American English. A series of experimental studies are considered which focus on establishing how s...

It has been shown that techniques known as grapheme-and-phoneme-to-phoneme (GP2P) conversion can be used to derive pronunciations in a poorly-resourced accent, such as South African English, using available pronunciations in better-resourced accents of the same language, such as British and American English. However if the pronunciation is not available in either accent, it must be obtained usi...

This paper examines predictions made by two theories of the relationship between pitch accent and focus. The empirical evidence presented suggests that listeners are sensitive to a variety of factors that may affect the focus projection ability of pitch accents, that is the ability of a pitch accent on one word to mark focus on a larger constituent. The findings suggest that listeners' interpre...