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. ...

Information-processing models of childhood anxiety highlight the centrality of memory processes in the maintenance and intensification of anxiety. Recent advances in memory research allow for an increasingly fine-grained analysis of the relation between anxiety and memory. The relation between childhood anxiety and memory was examined in a sample of 160 high- and low-trait-anxious sixth through...

The current study concerns loanword accent of Nakijin Ryukyuan 1 , hereafter NR. NR, as well as many Japonic languages or dialects, has a pitch accent system. Kubozono (2006) and Kubozono & Giriko (2011) claim that in several Japanese dialects loanword accent is determined by two factors: perceptual similarity between L1 (a borrowing language such as Tokyo Japanese) and L2 (a borrowed language ...

It is well known that speaker variability caused by accent is an important factor in speech recognition. Some major accents in China are so different as to make this problem very severe. In this paper, we propose a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) based Mandarin accent identification method. In this method, a number of GMMs are trained to identify the most likely accent given test utterances. The i...

This study focuses on the word accent opposition in a lesser known and endangered variety of Swedish – Estonian Swedish. The variety has been described as not making the tonal distinction between Accent 1 and Accent 2 words, but no systematic acoustic phonetic investigation has been carried out previously to confirm these descriptions. As materials, disyllabic words from read sentences, spontan...

We present results from a series of 151 speech recognition experiments based on the N4 corpus of accented English speech, using a small vocabulary recognition system. These experiments looked at the impact of foreign accent on speech recognition, both within non-native accented English and across different accents, with particular interest in using context free grammar technology to improve cal...

The performance of speech recognition systems degrades when speaker accent is diierent from that in the training set. Accent-independent or accent-dependent recognition both require collection of more training data. In this paper, we propose a faster accent classiica-tion approach using phoneme-class models. We also present our ndings in acoustic features sensitive to a Cantonese accent, and po...

This study aimed to determine the relative processing cost associated with comprehension of an unfamiliar native accent under adverse listening conditions. Two sentence verification experiments were conducted in which listeners heard sentences at various signal-to-noise ratios. In Experiment 1, these sentences were spoken in a familiar or an unfamiliar native accent or in two familiar native ac...