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This paper aims to focus on the stress pattern in English Language (EL). Learning the rules of stress in EL is a complex phenomenon. This article is an endeavor to look at this complex phenomenon in detail. The paper describes the rules both, in words and sentence levels. It gives information about the placement of stress in content and function words. The issue of primary and secondary stress has been discussed in the article. This research work presents too, the context, in which weak form words are stressed. The whole research work is done with the hope that the non-native speakers of English will get insight in learning the rules of stress and the work can also be utilized as guidelines for more scientific research in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Although English pitch accent detection has been studied extensively, there relatively a few works explore Mandarin stress detection. Moreover, the comparison and analysis between Mandarin stress detection and English pitch accent detection have not been touched for such counterpart tasks. In this paper, we discuss Mandarin stress detection and compare it with English pitch accent detection. The contributions of the paper are two aspects: one is that we use classifier combination method to detect Mandarin stress and English pitch accent by using acoustic, lexical and syntactic evidence. Our proposed method achieves better performance on both the Mandarin prosodic annotation corpus—ASCCD and the English prosodic annotation corpus—Boston University Radio News Corpus (BURNC) when compared with the baseline system. We also verify our proposed method on other prosodic annotation corpus and continuous speech corpus. The other is the feature analysis. Duration, pitch, energy and intensity features are compared for Mandarin stress detection and English pitch accent detection. Based on the analysis of prosodic annotation corpora, we also verify some linguistic conclusions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper provides an introduction to the acoustic–phonetic structure of English regional accents and presents a signal processing method for the modeling and transformation of the acoustic correlates of English accents for example from British English to American English. The focus of this paper is on the modeling of intonation and duration correlates of accents as the modeling of formants is described in previous papers (). The intonation correlates of accents are modeled with the statistics of a set of broad features of the pitch contour. The statistical models of phoneme durations and word speaking rates are obtained from automatic segmentation of word/phoneme boundaries of speech databases. A contribution of this paper is the use of accent synthesis for comparative evaluation of the causal effects of the acoustic correlates of accent. The differences between the acoustics–phonetic realizations of British Received Pronunciation (RP), Broad Australian (BAU) and General American (GenAm) English accents are modeled and used in an accent transformation and synthesis method for evaluation of the influence of formant, pitch and duration on conveying accents. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The paralinguistic information in a speech signal includes clues to the geographical and social background of the speaker. This paper is concerned with automatic extraction of this information from a short segment of speech. A state-of-the-art language identification (LID) system is applied to the problems of regional accent recognition for British English, and ethnic group recognition within a particular accent. We compare the results with human performance and, for accent recognition, the ‘text dependent’ ACCDIST accent recognition measure. For the 14 regional accents of British English in the ABI-1 corpus (good quality read speech), our LID system achieves a recognition accuracy of 89.6%, compared with 95.18% for our best ACCDIST-based system and 58.24% for human listeners. The “Voices across Birmingham” corpus contains significant amounts of telephone conversational speech for the two largest ethnic groups in the city of Birmingham (UK), namely the ‘Asian’ and ‘White’ communities. Our LID system distinguishes between these two groups with an accuracy of 96.51% compared with 90.24% for human listeners. Although direct comparison is difficult, it seems that our LID system performs much better on the standard 12 class NIST 2003 Language Recognition Evaluation task or the two class ethnic group recognition task than on the 14 class regional accent recognition task. We conclude that automatic accent recognition is a challenging task for speech technology, and speculate that the use of natural conversational speech may be advantageous for these types of paralinguistic task. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Over the past couple of decades, research has established that (1) infant-directed speech (IDS) facilitates speech, language, and cognitive development; and (2) infants are sensitive to the rhythmic structures in the ambient language. However, little is known about the role of IDS in infants' processing of rhythmic structures. Building on these two lines of research, whether IDS enhances infants' sensitivity to the predominant stress pattern (trochaic) in English was asked. To address this question, 9-month-old American infants were familiarized and tested with both trochaic (e.g., lazy) and iambic (e.g., cartoon) words presented in either IDS or adult-directed speech (ADS). Infants showed listening preference for the trochaic over iambic words when the speech was presented in ADS, but not in IDS. These results suggest that IDS attenuates infants' preference for trochaic stress pattern. Further acoustical analyses demonstrated that IDS provided less salient spectral cues for the contrasts between stressed and unstressed syllables in trochaic words. These findings encourage further efforts to explore the effects of IDS on language acquisition from a broader perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article begins with reflections on the theory of Chomsky and Halle 1968, which constituted a new departure in phonology. The indebtedness of the theory to Chomsky 1951 is noted, and certain inadequacies in the theory are discussed as well as the ways these were overcome in subsequent work, including Idsardi 1992. The revised theory is illustrated with an improved account of English word stress that includes a new treatment of the "Rhythm Rule," in particular, of contrasts such as ánecdòte vs. eléctròde ; vowel shortening in poststress position (e.g., sálivàte (cf. salíva), ínfamous (cf. fámous)); and "weak" syllable effects (Burzio 1994) (e.g., Lómbardy but Lombárdi). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]