Frequency characteristics of foreign accented speech

Author

Arslan, Levent M. ; Hansen, John H L

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. Eng., Duke Univ., Durham, NC, USA

Volume

2

fYear

1997

fDate

21-24 Apr 1997

Firstpage

1123

Abstract

In this study, the frequency characteristics of foreign accented speech is investigated. Experiments are conducted to discover the relative significance of different resonant frequencies and frequency bands in terms of their accent discrimination ability. It is shown that second and third formants are more important than other resonant frequencies. A filter bank analysis of accented speech supports this statement, where the 1500-2500 Hz range was shown to be the most significant frequency range in discriminating accented speech. Based on these results, a new frequency scale is proposed in place of the commonly used Mel-scale to extract the cepstrum coefficients from the speech signal. The proposed scale results in better performance for the problems of accent classification and language identification

Keywords

band-pass filters; cepstral analysis; feature extraction; filtering theory; natural languages; resonance; speech processing; 1500 to 2500 Hz; Mel-scale; accent classification; accent discrimination; cepstrum coefficients extraction; experiments; filter bank analysis; foreign accented speech; frequency bands; frequency characteristics; frequency range; frequency scale; language identification; performance; resonant frequencies; second formant; speech signal; third formant; Databases; Degradation; Frequency; Humans; Natural languages; Robustness; Speech analysis; Speech processing; Speech recognition; Vocabulary;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1997. ICASSP-97., 1997 IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Munich

ISSN

1520-6149

Print_ISBN

0-8186-7919-0

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICASSP.1997.596139

Filename

596139