This paper investigates the identification and discrimination of lexical pitch accent by native and non-native dialectal listeners. Specifically, this research is focused on examining the relation between linguistic experience and phonetic levels of discrimination in speech perception. Participants identified and discriminated the continuum resynthesized from three pitch accent minimal pairs of...

The variations of speech parameters due to emotion or stress are noticeable. In the presence of such variations, if a neutral model is used for the system, the speech recognition accuracy deteriorates. The evaluation of how emotion influences speech parameters is the first step towards emotional speech recognition. Pitch frequency is an important parameter in speech processing systems. Therefor...

Tonal identity and tonal variation in Mandarin have been the focus of intensive research that has long sought to bring out the underlying causes of variations in realized pitch values. Included among the variables studied in tonal variation are syntactic, contextual, emotional, and interactional influences. In the current study, we present results of our comparative research into tonal pitch va...

In this paper, a new approach to model syllable pitch contour for Mandarin speech is proposed. It takes the mean and shape of syllable pitch contour as two basic modeling units and considers several affecting factors that contribute to their variations. Parameters of the two models are automatically estimated by the EM algorithm. Experimental results showed that RMSEs of 0.551 ms and 0.614 ms i...

In low bit rate speech coders, pitch and voicing level estimation play an important role in quality of the synthesised speech. Although pitch usually evolves smoothly, sometimes it has irregular variations and as a result the estimated pitch and the voicing level differ from the real ones. This affects the performance of the speech coder. We propose to use a new modification as a preprocessor. ...

Lexical pitch accent languages such as Swedish and Japanese have been claimed to exhibit variation in phonological inventory and/or phonetic manifestation of pitch accents. This paper reports variations in the phonetic manifestation as well as phonological patterning of the lexical H*+L pitch accent in two Ryukyuan dialects – Shuri and Nakijin. The F0 manifestation of H*+L pitch accent in the t...

Despite the potentially negative effects on play performance and safety, little is currently known about the spatial and temporal variability in the properties of artificial turf pitches. The primary purpose of this study was to quantify the spatial and temporal variations in surface hardness across a 5-year-old third-generation artificial turf pitch over full year cycle. The secondary purpose ...