Discriminating languages with general measures of temporal regularity and spectral variance
Kathy M. Carbonell, Daniel Brenner, Andrew J. Lotto · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2012
There has been a lot of recent interest in distinguishing languages based on their rhythmic differences. A common successful approach involves measures of relative durations and duration variability of vowels and consonants in utterances. Recent studies have shown that more general measures of temporal regularities in the amplitude envelope in separate frequency bands (the Envelope Modulation Spectrum) can reliably discriminate between English and Spanish [Carbonell et al. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 129, 2680.]. In the current study, these temporal structure measures were supplemented with measures of the mean and variance of spectral energy in octave bands as well as with traditional linguistic measures. Using stepwise discriminant analysis and a set of productions from Japanese, Korean and Mandarin speakers, this suite of both acoustic and linguistic measures were tested together and pitted against each other to determine the most efficient discriminators of language. The results provide insight into what the traditional linguistic measures of speech rhythms are telling us about how language type structures the acoustic signal.