It is very common for a language to have different dialects or accents. The different pronunciations of the same words is one of the reasons for the different accents, in the same language. Swiss French accents have similar pronunciation to standard French, but noticeable differences in prosody. In this paper we investigate the use of standard French synthetic acoustic parameters combined with ...

In many languages affixes can assign accents on roots to which they attach. Some previous studies have claimed that accents assigned by affixes universally fall on syllables next to the affixes (Kurisu 2001; Revithiadou 2008). Kawahara and Wolf (2010) document a newly-coined suffix which counterexemplifies this generalization: the new Japanese suffix [-zu] assigns an accent on root-initial syll...

Accented speech poses a challenge for listeners, particularly those with limited knowledge of their language. In a series of studies, we explored the possibility that experience with variability, specifically the variability provided by multiple accents, would facilitate infants' comprehension of speech produced with an unfamiliar accent. 15- and 18-month-old American-English learning infants w...

Metrical accents, which are said to arise from perception of a beat in a rhythm, confer subjective prominence to events that fall on the beat. Does that mean the metrically accented events are perceived as physically more prominent (e.g., louder or longer) than other events? A recent study requiring participants to detect small physical changes in melodies having a subjectively imposed beat (Re...

2], there is also variation amongst consonants, particularly post-vocalic (as in ‘horse’, RP versus Scottish English) and postalveolar (as in ‘news’, RP versus General American). This paper reports on work developing an accent-independent lexicon for use in synthesising speech in English. Lexica which use phonemic transcriptions are only suitable for one accent, and developing a lexicon for a n...

We describe the results of large scale perception experiments showing improvements in synthesising two distinct kinds of prominence: standard pitch-accent and strong emphatic accents. Previously prominence assignment has been mainly evaluated by computing accuracy on a prominence-labelled test set. By contrast we integrated an automatic pitch-accent classifier into the unit selection target cos...

The problems of using the internal command \accent as a tool for support of some Cyrillic writing systems is investigated. It is shown that the internal features of \accent prevent construction of some Cyrillic letters which require several accents simultaneously. A special macro which emulates the work of \accent by some other commands is suggested. The accents for I/i and J/j, which are diffe...

By strictest interpretation, theories of both centering and intonational meaning fail to predict the existence of pitch accented pronominals. Yet they occur felicitously in spoken discourse. To explain this, I emphasize the dual functions served by pitch accents, as markers of both propositional (semantic/pragmatic) and attentional salience. This distinction underlies my proposals about the att...

How early in life, and in what situations, are children sensitive to speakers’ accents? Some researchers have suggested that accent is an early-developing, perhaps intrinsic, signal of group membership. However, other studies find little sensitivity to or awareness of accent in young children. Three experiments reported here examine 3-5-yearolds’ comprehension of, and social decision-making wit...