Speech communication is a highly interactive process in which speakers actively seek to align themselves with their interlocutors [9]. This study investigates phonetic alignment in spontaneous speech in speakers from two different regional accent backgrounds; Standard Southern British English (SSBE), the prestige accent of British English, and North-East English (NE), a nonstandard accent. Six ...

Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is a rare speech output disorder characterized by articulation of speech perceived by listeners (often including the patient) as sounding “foreign.” From Monrad-Krohn’s seminal paper in 1947 1 describing a Norwegian woman who, as a result of head trauma, began speaking with a German-sounding accent, several cases of FAS have been reported. Usually occurring in cons...

To build a robust pitch accent prediction system, we need to understand the effects of speech genre and speaker variation. This paper reports our studies on genre and speaker variation in pitch accent placement and their effects on automatic pitch accent prediction. We find some interesting accentuation pattern differences that can be attributed to speech genre, and a set of textual features th...

Accent is cited as an issue for speech recognition systems. If they are to be widely deployed, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems must deliver consistently high performance across user populations. Hence the development of accentrobust ASR is of significant importance. This research investigates techniques for compensating for the effects of accents on performance of Hidden Markov Model...

Japanese is widely recognized as a prototypical pitch-accent language, based on the fact that, given the “accent” location or the lack thereof, the tonal pattern of the entire word is totally predictable. Therefore, unlike tone languages, specification of the tone of each syllable is unnecessary. Consequently, it has been argued that, although Japanese may superficially resemble tone languages,...

This paper describes a proposed automatic language accent identification system based on phoneme class trajectory models. Our focus is to preserve discriminant information of the spectral evolution that belong to each accent. Here, we describe two classification schemes based on stochastic trajectory models; supervised and unsupervised classification. For supervised classification, we assume te...

A method was developed to utilize linguistic information (lexical accent types and syntactic boundaries) to improve the performance of the automatic extraction of the F0 contour generation process model commands. The extraction scheme is first to smooth the observed F0 contour by a piecewise 3 order polynomial function and to locate accent command positions by taking the derivative of the funct...

Recognition of foreign accented speech remains among the most difficult tasks in automatic speech recognition. It was observed that using models trained on foreign data together with native models improves the recognition for speakers with foreign accent. However such an approach degrades the recognition performances on native speakers. In order to avoid such performance degradation the degree ...

In the present study, event-related brain potentials (ERP) were recorded to investigate the role of pitch accent and lexical tone in spoken discourse comprehension. Chinese was used as material to explore the potential difference in the nature and time course of brain responses to sentence meaning as indicated by pitch accent and to lexical meaning as indicated by tone. In both cases, the pitch...

There is a systematic relationship between stress accent and vocalic identity in spontaneous English discourse (the Switchboard corpus composed of telephone dialogues). Low vowels are much more likely to be fully accented than their high vocalic counterparts. And conversely, high vowels are far more likely to lack stress accent than low or mid vocalic segments. Such patterns imply that stress a...