Jana Dankovicová

Aspects of non-native pronunciation in a case of altered accent following stroke (foreign accent syndrome)

Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) refers to a disorder that involves foreign sounding speech, usually following stroke. This paper presents a case study of an English patient allegedly speaking with a Scottish English accent after right-hemisphere stroke. The results of detailed impressionistic and acoustic analyses are reported, based on a direct comparison of the patients pre-stroke and post-stroke speech samples. The emphasis is on a comparison of the typical features of Scottish English and phonetic features actually found in the patients post-stroke speech. The respective roles of prosodic and segmental features in the post-stroke speech sample are also discussed. Rather untypically, prosodic features seem to be affected to a much lesser extent than segmental phonetic features in the patients post-stroke speech. They are, therefore, less likely to contribute to the perception of a foreign accent.

ProSynth: an integrated prosodic approach to device-independent, natural-sounding speech synthesis

This paper outlines ProSynth, an approach to speech synthesis which takes a rich linguistic structure as central to the generation of natural-sounding speech. We start from the assumption that the acoustic richness of the speech signal reflects linguistic structural richness and underlies the percept of naturalness. Naturalness achieved by paying attention to systematic phonetic detail in the spectral, temporal and intonational domains produces a perceptually robust signal that is intelligible in adverse listening conditions. ProSynth uses syntactic and phonological parses to model the fine acoustic‐phonetic detail of real speech. We present examples of our approach to modelling systematic segmental, temporal and intonational detail and show how all are integrated in the prosodic structure. Preliminary tests to evaluate the effects of modelling systematic fine spectral detail, timing, and intonation suggest that the approach increases intelligibility and naturalness. c 2000 Academic Press

Speaker verification with elicited speaking styles in the VeriVox project

Some experiments have been carried out to study and compensate for within-speaker variations in speaker verification. To induce speaker variation, a speaking behaviour elicitation software package has been developed. A 50-speaker database with voluntary and involuntary speech variation has been recorded using this software. The database has been used for acoustic analysis as well as for automatic speaker verification (ASV) tests. The voluntary speech variations are used to form an enrolment set for the ASV system. This set is called structured training and is compared to neutral training where only normal speech is used. Both sets contain the same number of utterances. It is found that the ASV system improves its performance when testing on a mixed speaking style test without decreasing the performance of the tests with normal speech.

The relationship between musical skills, music training, and intonation analysis skills.

Few attempts have been made to look systematically at the relationship between musical and intonation analysis skills, a relationship that has been to date suggested only by informal observations. Following Mackenzie Beck (2003), who showed that musical ability was a useful predictor of general phonetic skills, we report on two studies investigating the relationship between musical skills, musical training, and intonation analysis skills in English. The specially designed music tasks targeted pitch direction judgments and tonal memory. The intonation tasks involved locating the nucleus, identifying the nuclear tone in stimuli of different length and complexity, and same / different contour judgments. The subjects were university students with basic training in intonation analysis. Both studies revealed an overall significant relationship between musical training and intonation task scores, and between the music test scores and intonation test scores. A more detailed analysis, focusing on the relationship between the individual music and intonation tests, yielded a more complicated picture. The results are discussed with respect to differences and similarities between music and intonation, and with respect to form and function of intonation. Implications of musical training on development of intonation analysis skills are considered. We argue that it would be beneficial to investigate the differences between musically trained and untrained subjects in their analysis of both musical stimuli and intonational form from a cognitive point of view.

Temporal markers of prosodic boundaries in children's speech production

It is often thought that the ability to use prosodic features accurately is mastered in early childhood. However, research to date has produced conflicting evidence, notably about the development of children’s ability to mark prosodic boundaries. This paper investigates (i) whether, by the age of eight, children use temporal boundary features in their speech in a systematic way, and (ii) to what extent adult listeners are able to interpret their production accurately and unambiguously. The material consists of minimal pairs of utterances: one utterance includes a compound noun, in which there is no prosodic boundary after the first noun, e.g. ‘coffee-cake and tea’, while the other utterance includes simple nouns, separated by a prosodic boundary, e.g. ‘coffee, cake and tea’. Ten eight-year-old children took part, and their productions were rated by 23 adult listeners. Two phonetic exponents of prosodic boundaries were analysed: pause duration and phrase-final lengthening. The results suggest that, at the age of 8, there is considerable variability among children in their ability to mark phrase boundaries of the kind analysed in the experiment, with some children failing to differentiate between the members of the minimal pairs reliably. The differences between the children in their use of boundary features were reflected in the adults’ perceptual judgements. Both temporal cues to prosodic boundaries significantly affected the perceptual ratings, with pause being a more salient determinant of ratings than phrase-final lengthening.