Acknowledgements I'd like to thank Jochen Triesch for his supervision over the last year, during which he introduced me to the field of computational neuroscience. I thoroughly enjoyed his lectures (for instance on Reinforcement Learning) and his insights and advice whenever we discussed my work. Many thanks to Max Murakami. Having (in his master thesis) developed the original speech acquisitio...

In this paper, methods for reconciling pronunciation differences between a rule-based front-end and the pronunciations observed in a database of recorded speech are presented. The methods are applied to the IBM Expressive Speech Synthesis System [1] for both unrestricted and limited-domain text-to-speech synthesis. One method is based on constructing a multiple pronunciation lattice for the giv...

Dialects of the same language can differ in the casual speech processes they allow; e.g., British English allows the insertion of [r] at word boundaries in sequences such as saw ice, while American English does not. In two speeded word recognition experiments, American listeners heard such British English sequences; in contrast to non-native listeners, they accurately perceived intended vowel-i...

Two groups of listeners with Dutch and British English language backgrounds judged Dutch and British English utterances, respectively, which varied in the intonation contour on the scales EMPHATIC vs. NOT EMPHATIC and SURPRISED vs. NOT SURPRISED, two meanings derived from the Effort Code. The stimuli, which differed in sentence mode but were otherwise lexically equivalent, were varied in peak h...

This article deals with the regional variants of English language and describes in detail currently relevant reasons for appearance dialects their existence modern English. The main theoretical basis this research proves that one person’s individual speech is result mixing varieties features. analyses foreign linguistical discussions about American variant its influence on British wit...

Carter & Local [3] report acoustic data showing that in two varieties of British English, the liquids /l/ and /r/ are polarised in terms of ‘darkness’ along the F2 dimension; Leeds English has dark onset /l/ (low F2) and a light onset /r/ (high F2), and Newcastle English has the opposite pattern. Here we report data on liquid polarisation for Australian English, a variety reported to show a ver...

Singapore English (SE) and British English (BE) have been claimed to differ in lexical stress placement. Examples frequently cited in the literature involve polysyllabic words such as hopelessly and compounds such as blackboard. Such words are stressed word-initially in BE, but are said to be stressed word-finally in SE. In the present paper, we investigate the acoustic evidence for the suggest...

Cantonese English tonal patterns are analyzed based on the description provided by K.K. Luke. Results of a production test with isolated words lead to the conclusion that the language has at least three intonations, declarative, emphatic and interrogative. The last two are expressed through the boundary tones L% and H%, while the first is characterized by having no boundary tone. The interactio...

Six experiments using the headturn preference procedure investigated 5-month-old American infants’ ability to discriminate languages. The impetus for the present study was a report that newborns discriminate languages across, but not within, rhythmic classes (Nazzi et al., 1998). Two experiments verified that at 5 months, infants still discriminate pairs of languages from different rhythmic cla...