I-vector based recognition is a well-established technique in state-of-the-art speaker and language recognition but its use in dialect and accent classification has received less attention. In this work, we extensively experiment with the spectral feature based i-vector system on Finnish foreign accent recognition task. Parameters of the system are initially tuned with the CallFriend corpus. Th...

Foreign accent syndrome occurs rarely after stroke. Most patients with this syndrome develop an aphasia characterized by a new accent. This report presents a 48-year-old man who sustained a left parietal hemorrhagic stroke resulting in right hemiparesis and the inability to speak. As spontaneous speech emerged several weeks later, he was noted to have a Broca's aphasia and a Dutch accent. Analy...

The study connects two major topics in current speech research: foreign accentedness and speech in adverse conditions. We parallel the research in intelligibility of non-native speech, but instead of linguistic unit recognition we focus on the perception of the foreign accent strength. First, the question of type and degree of perceptual deficiencies occurring along with certain types of signal...

What aspects of the speech signal cause listeners to perceive a foreign accent? While many studies have explored this question for a single variety of non-native speech, few have simultaneously considered non-native speech from multiple native language backgrounds. In this perception study, American Englishspeaking listeners rated stop-vowel sequences extracted from English words produced by L1...

This study investigates the influence of L1 on L2 with respect to linguistic rhythm. The L2 English of French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish speakers is compared with L1 English. The results show that the linguistic rhythm of L1 transfers to L2. Compared to L1 English, L2 English has shorter stressed vowels but longer reduced vowel. Stressed vowels in the L2 English of stress-timed lang...

An English speaking women developed a French accent, without any aphasic syndromes, in conjunction with multiple left sided cranial nerve deficits, temporally related to cranial trauma. Extensive testing with multimodality magnetic resonance imaging, cerebrospinal fluid and laboratory analysis was unremarkable. She was followed over a 3 year period during which her French accent resolved as did...

English speech based on accent dependent parallel phoneme recognition (PPR) has been developed. The classifier is designed to process continuous speech and to discriminate between native Australian English (AuE) speakers and two migrant speaker groups with foreign accents, whose first languages are Lebanese Arabic (LA) and South Vietnamese (SV). The training of the system can be automated and i...

2 1. Introduction Foreign accent, as an identifying aspect of nonnative speech, has been widely discussed in both the theoretical and pedagogical literature. Still, the elements that contribute to the perception of foreign accent, and, indeed, the objective characteristics of it, remain ill defined. With this in mind, numerous studies have sought to quantify degrees of foreign accentedness by a...

In Tokyo Japanese, vowel devoicing is a common process leading to the reduction of high, unstressed vowels, mostly when they occur between unvoiced consonants. Native Japanese speakers learning German show a strong tendency to produce these devoiced vowels in the foreign language, too, despite the lack of this regular process in that language, here in German. This study examines the extent to w...