BACKGROUND In an increasingly multicultural society, all individuals are likely to come into contact with speakers with unfamiliar accents. Recent figures suggest that such accent variation may be particularly apparent within the healthcare workforce. Research on accent variation has demonstrated that an unfamiliar speaker accent can affect listener comprehension, but the impact of speaker acce...

Oral fluency and foreign accent distinguish L2 from L1 speech production. In language testing practices, both fluency and accent are usually assessed by raters. This study investigates what exactly native raters of fluency and accent take into account when judging L2. Our aim is to explore the relationship between objectively measured temporal, segmental and suprasegmental properties of speech ...

In spoken word identification and memory tasks, stimulus variability from numerous sources impairs performance. In the current study, the influence of foreign-accent variability on spoken word identification was evaluated in two experiments. Experiment 1 used a between-subjects design to test word identification in noise in single-talker and two multiple-talker conditions: multiple talkers with...

Source Generator Based Prosodic Features John H.L. Hansen and Levent M. Arslan Robust Speech Processing Laboratory Duke University Department of Electrical Engineering Box 90291, Durham, North Carolina 27708-0291 ABSTRACT Speaker accent is an important issue in the formulation of robust speaker independent recognition systems. Knowledge gained from a reliable accent classi cation approach could...

Neurogenic foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is diagnosed when listeners perceive speech associated with motor speech impairments as foreign rather than disordered. Speakers with foreign accent syndrome typically have aphasia. It remains unclear how far language changes might contribute to the perception of foreign accent syndrome independent of accent. Judges with and without training in language ...

In this paper we investigate speech recognition performance of systems employing several accent-specific recognisers in parallel for the simultaneous recognition of multiple accents. We compare these systems with oracle systems, in which test utterances are presented to matching accent-specific recognisers, and with accent-independent systems, in which acoustic and language model training data ...

The effect of accent [pronunciation of speech sounds determined by a speaker’s regional or national location] on auditory speech comprehension has been well documented, but research is lacking as to its effects on visual speech understanding. In order to address this, the present study examined the effect of regional accent variation on speechreading performance. The aim was to determine if fam...

This paper presents an exemplar-theoretic account of pitchaccent variability. Results from two experiments are reported. The first experiment examines variability / similarity across a range of pitch-accent contour types which vary in frequency of occurrence. The results report similar behaviour across the frequency bins and are indicative of pitch-accent immunity from frequency effects. The se...

We studied how American subjects learning Japanese perceive tonal accents under different experimental conditions. The perceptual experiment included 3 tests, each one containing 24 words consisting of 3, 4, and 5 moras with different tonal accents. Two groups of 54 American students were asked to detect words accent. An analysis of variance showed that test, mora, and accent type factors were ...

This paper proposes two methods that estimate, from the word reading (syllable sequence), the place in the word where the accent should be placed (hereafter we call it “accent type”). Both methods use a statistical classifier; one directly estimates accent type, and the other first estimates tone high and low labels and then decides the accent type from the tone label sequence obtained before. ...