A study of temporal features and frequency characteristics in American English foreign accent
作者:
Levent M. Arslan,
John H. L. Hansen,
期刊:
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
(AIP Available online 1997)
卷期:
Volume 102,
issue 1
页码: 28-40
ISSN:0001-4966
年代: 1997
DOI:10.1121/1.419608
出版商: Acoustical Society of America
数据来源: AIP
摘要:
In this paper, a detailed acoustic study of foreign accent is proposed using temporal features, intonation patterns, and frequency characteristics in American English. Using a database which consists of words uttered in isolation, temporal features such as voice onset time, word-final stop closure duration, and characteristics of duration are investigated. Accent differences for native-produced versus Mandarin, German, and Turkish accented English utterances are analyzed. Of the dimensions considered, the most important accent relayer is found to be word-final stop closure duration. Mandarin accented English utterances show significant differences in terms of this feature when compared to native speaker utterances. In addition, the intonation characteristics across a set of foreign accents in American English is investigated. It is shown that Mandarin speaker utterances possess a larger negative continuative intonation slope than native speaker utterances, and German speaker utterances had a more positive intonation slope when compared to native speaker utterances. Finally, a detailed frequency analysis of foreign accented speech is conducted. It is shown that the midfrequency range (1500–2500 Hz) is the most sensitive frequency band to non-native speaker pronunciation variations. Based on this knowledge a new frequency scale for the calculation of cepstrum coefficients is formulated which is shown to outperform the Mel-scale in terms of its ability to classify accent automatically among four accent classes.
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