Studies into phonetic adaptation rarely consider individual differences (IDs) on a cognitive and personality level between speakers as a direct source of adaptation variation. In order to investigate the degree to which the individual phonetic talent and further psycho-cognitive IDs of speakers affect phonetic convergence in a second language setting, 20 German native speakers were involved in two dialog tasks with two native speakers of English, a male speaker of American English and a female speaker of Standard Southern British English. The dialogs were quasi-spontaneous task-oriented interactions elicited with the Diapix picture-matching game. The English L2 learners were divided into a phonetically talented and less talented group based on their test results and evaluation in a preceding extensive language talent test battery. The acoustic analyses using amplitude envelopes revealed that talented speakers converged significantly more toward their English native speaking partners in the Diapix study. An additional analysis relates their degree of convergence to a range of personality and cognitive measures. The factors openness, neuroticism, Behavior Inhibition score and the switch costs in a Simon Test significantly impacted the degree of phonetic convergence in the dialog study.

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The quality of speech synthesis has come a long way since Homer Dudley's "Voder"in 1939. In fact, with the widespread use of unit-selection synthesizers, the naturalness of the synthesized speech is now high enough to pass the Turing test for short utterances, such as voice prompts. Therefore, it seems valid to ask the question "what are the next challenges for TTS Research?" This paper tries to identify unsolved issues, the solution of which would greatly enhance the state of the art in TTS.

The F0 patterns typical of German and American English are analyzed within the framework of a category-based description of intonation events as established by the ToBI prosodic transcription system. This description is supplemented by intonation rules for the categories’ phonetic implementation. The rules are also the basis for the process of F0 generation and resynthesis, which facilitates determining which aspects in non-native speech are responsible for the perception of intonational foreign accent. An analysis of the productions of native speakers of American English who are fluent in German shows a distinct influence of L1 prosodic characteristics on L2. It consists of a transfer of native prosodic settings to L2. Several types of intonational foreign accent are identified. Tonal categories, such as pitch accents or boundary tones, are affected in two ways: either an incorrect category is selected or it is assigned to an inappropriate part of the intonation phrase. Transfer effects are particularly distinct in the American speakers’ phonetic realization of corresponding tonal categories. The Americans also maintain other prosodic language-specific features like pitch range. Overall, prosodic behavior in L2 acquisition seems quite similar to segmental behavior and in accordance with current models of segmental L2 acquisition.

In a previous study exploring American English question intonation, we found that some speakers deviated considerably from expected question prosody. In this study, we focus on listener-rated acceptability of the various prosodic patterns observed for yes/no and wh questions. A variety of intonational patterns realized in both question utterances recorded from five female and three male professional speakers and in questions synthesized from several TTS voices of both genders was presented to listeners. Subjects judged the acceptability of each utterance in the context of a dialogue between a travel agent and customer. We hypothesized that question utterances with the expected intonational features (phrase-final fall in wh questions, phrase-final rise in yes/no questions) would be rated as more acceptable than question utterances with deviating intonational features, and that this result would hold for both natural and synthetic speech conditions. In addition, following our previous results, we hypothesized that the unexpected intonation pattern of phrase-final falls for yes/no questions would be more acceptable for lower-pitched than for higher-pitched voices. We also varied the prominence of the interrogative pronouns in synthetic wh questions in order to see whether simulating their high intonational prominence in natural wh questions improved the acceptability of synthetic wh questions.