Calibrating rhythms in L1 Japanese and Japanese accented English
Ratree P. Wayland, Takeshi Nozawa · Proceedings of meetings on acoustics · 2019
Japanese and Japanese-accented English utterances produced by native Japanese speakers were classified using rhythm spectra automatically derived from the speech signals. Results of a stepwise discriminant function analysis revealed an overall classification rate of 81.9% (chance = 50%) for Japanese and 85.9% for English utterances. Two parameters extracted from the spectra emerged as the strongest predictors: normalized amplitude modulation rate above 4 Hz in the 1,000 Hz octave band frequency and normalized amplitude modulation rate between 3-6 Hz in the 4,000 Hz octave band. These results suggested that native Japanese speakers produce Japanese and English with different patterns of temporal regularities in the amplitude envelope of the speech waveform.