Frequency characteristics of foreign accented speech

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.