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...

By their second birthday, children are beginning to map meaning to form with relative ease. One challenge for these developing abilities is separating information relevant to word identity (i.e. phonemic information) from irrelevant information (e.g. voice and foreign accent). Nevertheless, little is known about toddlers’ abilities to ignore irrelevant phonetic detail when faced with the demand...

The results of this study suggest that German monolingual listeners were more likely to perceive a global foreign accent in the native German speech of consecutive bilinguals in Anglophone Canada and the Dutch Netherlands than in the speech of a control group of monolingual Germans in Germany. The results furthermore suggest that contact with the native German language may have a more significa...

In this paper we propose an automatic approach for foreign accent identification. Knowledge of the speaker’s origin allows to adapt acoustic models for non-native speech recognition. In this study, we use a statistical approach based on prosodic parameters. This approach relies on the fact that prosody is different between languages, and has been done within the framework of the HIWIRE (Human I...

We have recently proposed a universal acoustic characterisation to foreign accent recognition, in which any spoken foreign accent was described in terms of a common set of fundamental speech attributes. Although experimental evidence demonstrated the feasibility of our approach, we belive that speech attributes, namely manner and place of articulation, can be better modelled by a deep neural ne...

We present an evaluation of the perception of foreign-accented natural and synthetic speech in comparison to accent-reduced synthetic speech. Our method for foreign accent conversion is based on mapping of Hidden Semi-Markov Model states between accented and non-accented voice models and does not need an average voice model of accented speech. We employ the method on recorded data of speakers w...

Can the foreign accent of a speaker be recognized based on suprasegmental temporal information? For a perception experiment we created stimuli based on German sentences read by six French and six English speakers. These foreignaccented sentences were manipulated by (1) applying a lowpass filter with a cutoff frequency of 300 Hz and (2) applying the same lowpass filter and monotonizing F0. In a ...

Foreign-accented speech has most commonly been characterized across three related, but independent dimensions: intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accent [6]. The present study applied an auditory free classification task, which has been used to test listeners’ perceptual representations of regional dialects [5] and different languages [3], to further investigate the salient perceptual dime...

BACKGROUND Numerous studies have demonstrated that the negative effect of noise and other distortions on speech understanding is greater for older adults than for younger adults. Anecdotal evidence suggests that older adults may also be disproportionately negatively affected by foreign accent. While two previous studies found no interaction between foreign accent and listener age, these studies...