Effect of language, speaking style and talker on a spectral rhythm measure.

Abstract

Recently, two spectro‐temporal approaches have been proposed for characterizing cross‐language and disordered speech rhythm: power spectrum [Tilsen and Johnson (2008)] and speech envelope modulation spectrum (EMS) [Liss et al. (2010)]. These measures quantify the rhythmicity of speech within specified frequency bands. In the present study, the EMS measure was employed to assess the effect of language, speaking style, and talker on rhythm. In order to examine the rhythmic characteristics of conversational and speaking styles in English and Croatian, utterances produced by two female speakers of each language in clear and conversational speaking styles were analyzed [Smiljanic and Bradlow (2005)]. The spectral centroid, a weighted mean of a spectrum, was used to measure the center of mass of the EMS extracted for each utterance. Results from nested factorial analyzes revealed that the spectro‐temporal characteristics differed for English and Croatian, for the conversational and clear speaking sentences, and for individual talkers. These results suggest that the low rate amplitude modulations of a signal can be used to distinguish rhythmic properties across languages, speaking styles, and talkers. Furthermore, these automated spectral measures provide a new means for characterizing rhythm that bypasses laborious manual measurements and phonologically dependent segmentation criteria.