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 ...

Training a robust system, e.g., Speech to Text (STT), requires large datasets. Variability present in the dataset, such as unwanted nuances and biases, is reason for need datasets learn general representations. In this work, we propose novel approach induce invariance using adversarial forgetting (AF). Our initial experiments on learning invariant features accent STT task achieve better general...

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...

In this study we propose two methods to improve HMM speech recognition performance. The rst method employs an adjustment in the training stage, whereas the second method employs it in the scoring stage. It is well known that speech recognition system performance increases when the amount of labeled training data is large. However, due to factors such as inaccurate phonetic labeling, end-point d...