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Lexical stress is realised similarly in English, German, and Dutch. On a suprasegmental level, stressed syllables tend to be longer and more acoustically salient than unstressed syllables; segmentally, vowels in unstressed syllables are often reduced. The frequency of unreduced unstressed syllables (where only the suprasegmental cues indicate lack of stress) however, differs across the languages. The present studies test whether listener behaviour is affected by these vocabulary differences, by investigating German listeners’ use of suprasegmental cues to lexical stress in German and English word recognition. In a forced-choice identification task, German listeners correctly assigned single-syllable fragments (e.g., Kon-) to one of two words differing in stress (KONto, konZEPT). Thus, German listeners can exploit suprasegmental information for identifying words. German listeners also performed above chance in a similar task in English (with, e.g., DIver, diVERT), i.e., their sensitivity to these cues also transferred to a nonnative language. An English listener group, in contrast, failed in the English fragment task. These findings mirror vocabulary patterns: German has more words with unreduced unstressed syllables than English does.

Item does not contain fulltext The term "uptalk" describes utterance-final pitch rises that carry no sentence-structural information. Uptalk is usually dialectal or sociolectal, and Australian English (AusEng) is particularly known for this attribute. We ask here whether experience with an uptalk variety affects listeners' ability to categorise rising pitch contours on the basis of the timing and height of their onset and offset. Listeners were two groups of English-speakers (AusEng, and American English), and three groups of listeners with L2 English: one group with Mandarin as L1 and experience of listening to AusEng, one with German as L1 and experience of listening to AusEng, and one with German as L1 but no AusEng experience. They heard nouns (e.g. flower, piano) in the framework "Got a NOUN", each ending with a pitch rise artificially manipulated on three contrasts: low vs. high rise onset, low vs. high rise offset and early vs. late rise onset. Their task was to categorise the tokens as "question" or "statement", and we analysed the effect of the pitch contrasts on their judgements. Only the native AusEng listeners were able to use the pitch contrasts systematically in making these categorisations. Speech Prosody 2020 (Tokyo, Japan, 25-28 May 2020)

A sharable software repository for Japanese LVCSR (Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition) is introduced. It is designed as a baseline platform for research and developed by researchers of different academic institutes under a governmental support. The repository consists of a recognition engine (Julius), Japanese acoustic models and statistical language models as well as Japanese morphological analysis tools. These modules can be easily integrated and replaced under a plug-and-play framework, which makes it possible to fairly evaluate components and to develop specific application systems. Assessment of these modules and systems in a 20000-word dictation task is reported. The software repository is freely available to the public., ICSLP2000: the 6th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, October 16-20, 2000, Beijing, China.

The project of Japanese LVCSR (Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition) platform is introduced. It is a collaboration of researchers of different academic institutes and intended to develop a sharable software repository of not only databases but also models and programs. The platform consists of a standard recognition engine, Japanese phone models and Japanese statistical language models. A set of Japanese phone HMMs are trained with ASJ (Acoustic Society of Japan) databases of 20K sentence utterances per each gender. Japanese word N-gram (2-gram and 3-gram) models are constructed with a corpus of Mainichi newspaper of four years. The recognition engine JULIUS is developed for assessment of both acoustic and language models. The modules are integrated as a Japanese LVCSR system and evaluated on 5000-word dictation task. The software repository is available to the public., ICSLP1998: the 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, November 30 - December 4, 1998, Sydney, Australia.