Linguistic Processing of Accented Speech Across the Lifespan

Creel, S. C., and Bregman, M. R. How talker identity relates to language processing. Linguist. Compass 5, 190–204. Butler, J., Floccia, C., Goslin, J., and Panneton, R. Infants’ discrimination of familiar and unfamiliar accents in speech.

Nearly everywhere in the world, a simple trip to the market will most likely put you within earshot of dialectal or foreign accents. For instance, a report of 26 countries by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (2007) estimated that about 9% of each country’s population was foreign and thus might speak a language not spoken in their current country of residence. To take a more specific example, a census report in the USA documents that 20% of respondents declared speaking a language other than English at home, and half of that 20% estimated their own English speaking abilities as below fluent (United States Census Bureau, 2008). Moreover, these numbers underestimate the likelihood of encountering an accent different from one’s own, as they do not take into account variation in within-language accents.

Specialists in infancy, childhood, adulthood, and aging have all investigated initial processing costs, although the level of precision with which these questions have been investigated varies. The exact ways in which an accent trumps speech processing have been best described for younger adults. Accent affects both speed and accuracy, and may lead to different processing styles in young adults.

Specifically, the procedure is identical to the segmentation studies described above, except that the familiarization stimuli are spoken in one accent, and the test passages in a different accent. In both cases, the older group succeeded where the younger group failed. Naturally, as we pointed out for the language preference tasks, here the effects of experience and maturation are confounded.

Second, voice familiarity appears to increase memory for words or sentences, though results vary for different task types (see Luce and Lyons, 1998; Goh, 2005, for discussions). Recognition memory for words is more accurate when the voice is the same at exposure and at test, and this same voice priming can last for up to a week (Goldinger, 1996). The effects of voice consistency appear to be more robust in explicit memory tasks than in implicit memory tasks (Goldinger, 1996; Luce and Lyons, 1998; but see Schacter and Church, 1992 and Church and Schacter, 1994 for evidence of voice effects in implicit tasks). An important contribution of this literature relates to the marked developmental changes that have been documented, with the general pattern being that older age groups succeed in recognizing wordforms across accents more readily than younger ones. One interpretation of such findings is that experience teaches learners to ignore accent-related differences, allowing them to retrieve the constant phonological and lexical information.

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These AI-powered tools understand spoken language to perform tasks, answer questions, and provide recommendations. After arriving at the overall market size from the estimation process explained above, the overall market has been split into several segments and subsegments. The data triangulation procedure has been employed wherever applicable to complete the overall market engineering process and arrive at the exact statistics for all segments and subsegments. The data has been triangulated by studying various factors and trends from both the demand and supply sides. Additionally, the market size has been validated using top-down and bottom-up approaches.

Further processing is required to normalise it. The study involved four major activities in estimating the current size of the ChatGPT App Text-to-Speech market. Exhaustive secondary research was done to collect information on the market, peer, and parent markets.

121, 1701–1708. Floccia, C., Delle Luche, C., Durrant, S., Butler, J., and Goslin, J. Parent or community?

Their performance was improved both when the same speaker was used for pre-exposure and test, and when four different voices with the same accent, none of whom produced the test stimuli, told the brief stories. Toddlers’ performance in accommodating the foreign accent was unaffected by a pre-exposure to one or four native English speakers, suggesting that the improvement was truly driven by foreign accent exposure. Presentation of the sound is contingent on the infant orienting toward the source of the sound, and looking times are measured. Discrimination is surmised to have occurred if infants orient longer when hearing the novel variety than when the familiarized variety is being presented.

Regional Analysis

A fully AI-powered newsroom has the potential to revolutionise journalism in numerous ways. Konstantinos Antonopoulos, a journalist at the Al Jazeera Media Institute, envisions several key tasks that AI can perform to assist journalists in their work. As AI models become more adept at analysing data and learning independently, predicting the scope of AI’s future capabilities becomes increasingly challenging. However, the use of AI presenters has surged recently, with various countries, including Bangladesh, adopting them. Notably, some news channels rely on Software as a Service (SaaS) companies for their AI presenters, raising questions about the extent of in-house AI research and development.

While there are chatbots like ChatGPT for English, there is a notable absence of similar chatbots for languages like Bangla due to the scarcity of data and suitable processing capabilities. Hi, I would like to download a report which contains text to speech (TTS) market size, main players, trend forecast etc. Palmeri, T. J., Goldinger, S. D., and Pisoni, D. B. Episodic encoding of voice attributes and recognition memory for spoken words.

Accent Perception in Early Adulthood

Furthermore, the work carried out with older adults suggests that certain cognitive skills (such as selective attention) could play a major role in adaptation. It is crucial to extend this insight regional accents present challenges for natural language processing. to other populations, and particularly to infancy, toddlerhood, and childhood, where cognitive skills are in constant development. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. One recurrent question was the format of adaptation.

A substantial hurdle confronted by the Text-to-Speech (TTS) market is the intricate task of developing a generic acoustic database that can effectively cover the extensive array of language variations. The quest for achieving natural-sounding speech synthesis across diverse linguistic contexts necessitates the creation of comprehensive databases that encompass not only different languages but also various accents, dialects, and regional nuances. This poses a formidable challenge as it demands ongoing efforts to update databases continuously, accommodating the dynamic evolution of language patterns and the ever-expanding global linguistic diversity. The significance of overcoming this challenge cannot be overstated. Additionally, in many perceptual adaptation paradigms, listeners are exposed to a single talker with a quirky pronunciation, and tested on the same voice used in the exposure phase.

The implementation of TTS in educational materials and e-learning platforms enhances accessibility, making content more inclusive for all students. As digital learning gains prominence, educational institutions are leveraging TTS for providing interactive and personalized content delivery. Additionally, the growing awareness of diverse learning styles and the emphasis on inclusive education contribute to the rising adoption of Text-to-Speech solutions, position. Peelle, J. E., and Wingfield, A. Dissociations in perceptual learning revealed by adult age differences in adaptation to time-compressed speech. Psychol.

An interesting question, to which the answer is far from obvious, is whether the influence of suprasegmental and lexical cues to accentedness could be a stable predictor of individual differences in accented speech perception in older adults. Thus, based on the similarity of behavioral evidence of initial processing costs and perceptual adaptation effects, one could posit the hypothesis that the same underlying mechanisms govern processing of talker and accent variation (e.g., Nygaard and Pisoni, 1998). In some cases, the parallel between voice and accent normalization is transformed into an explicit assumption of how speech processing should proceed.

Industries are encountering limitations in contextual understanding, emotional intelligence, and managing complex, multi-turn conversations. Addressing these challenges is crucial to realizing the full potential of conversational AI. In today’s business landscape, customers demand quick and seamless interactions enhanced by technology.

Therefore, unless follow-up experiments are carried out, it usually is impossible to be sure that results reflect adaptation to very specific features, or rather more general adaptation processes. In fact, when the question has been addressed, it has been found that the level of specificity varies across studies. In order to have precise control on ChatGPT exposure and accent complexity, a recent line of work has opted to train listeners on artificially created, novel accents. These studies simulate what it is like to be exposed to a new regional or foreign accent – or at least to one feature of a new accent – and thus may help us better understand how initial adaptation to real accents might occur.

125, 2361–2373. Hallé, P., and de Boysson-Bardies, B. The format of representation of recognized words in infants’ early receptive lexicon. Infant Behav. 19, 465–483.

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Further, participants with prior exposure to NYC English showed both form (“slenda” primes “slenda” and “slender”) and semantic priming (“slenda” primes “thin”) for NYC English primes on NYC English and GA English targets. However, GA English speakers did not show semantic priming for NYC English primes (“slenda” does not prime “thin”), suggesting that experience with the dialect is necessary for a dialect form to facilitate processing. Exposure effects are also evident when exposure is mostly through media, as shown by studies of asymmetrical cross-accent perception. For example, Impe et al. (2008) found that Netherlandic speakers of Dutch are much slower in a lexical decision task when processing words recorded by Belgian Dutch speakers than by fellow Dutchmen, while Belgian Dutch speakers process both varieties equally well. Similarly, in Adank et al. (2009), a truth value judgment task was administered to both Glasgow and London listeners using spoken stimuli recorded from Glasgow and London talkers. While Londoners were slower with the speech from Glasgow speakers than the speech from speakers of their own accent, Glaswegians were equally fast with both accents.

This makes news easier to understand for a broader audience, fostering greater engagement and comprehension. In the top-down approach, the overall market size has been used to estimate the size of individual markets (mentioned in the market segmentation) through percentage splits from secondary and primary research. The bottom-up approach was used to arrive at the overall size of the Text-to-Speech market from the revenues of the key players and their shares in the market. The overall market size was calculated based on the revenues of the key players identified in the market. The authenticity and naturalness of synthesized speech are directly contingent on the richness and accuracy of the underlying acoustic database. Text-to-speech providers must grapple with the complexities of capturing the subtleties inherent in diverse linguistic expressions to deliver solutions that resonate authentically with users across a spectrum of cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

Commenting on this, Sadeque said, “I don’t think any media has yet developed the technical capabilities where they can build a completely AI presenter from scratch, who can present news in a completely new language fluently through natural gestures.” Joe Murphy, Business Development Manager at DeepBrain AI, explained the entire process of making this AI presenter in an interview with VentureBeat, a technology-focused media outlet. It is known that the original presenter was given a special script of 500 to 1000 sentences to read out, which contains almost all the phonemes of the language. The cost-effectiveness of cloud deployment is particularly attractive to businesses seeking efficient and budget-friendly solutions, especially smaller enterprises. Additionally, cloud-based Text-to-Speech services facilitate seamless updates and maintenance, ensuring users consistently access the latest advancements in voice synthesis technology.

• How’d you get that accent?
• 47, 379–390.
• Goldinger, S. D., Pisoni, D. B., and Logan, J. S.
• Children have also been tested on their ability to categorize talkers on the basis of their accents.
• Perception of dialect variation in noise intelligibility and classification.

However, the perceived strength of the accent in the foreign accented stimuli was stronger than in the within-language accent ones in that study, which could have explained the greater salience of the foreign accented features than the within-language features. Floccia et al. (2009) addressed this concern by selecting stimuli spoken in a regional (Irish) accent and a foreign (French) accent on the basis of similar ratings of accent strength by British speakers of English. Specifically, 7-year-olds were better at spotting the foreign accent over the within-language accent. Curiously, this same tendency was not statistically significant for the 5-year-olds. One interpretation of these results is that children are increasingly sensitive to a foreign accent with age and experience.