A study of temporal features and frequency characteristics in American English foreign accent

Abstract

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.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 79 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.