Abstract
There has been a great deal of work on classifying spoken languages according to their perceived or acoustically‐measured rhythmic structures. The current study examined the speech of 12 Spanish‐English bilinguals producing sentences in both languages using rhythmic measures based on the amplitude envelopes extracted from different frequency regions—the envelope modulation spectrum (EMS). Using discriminant factor analysis, EMS variables demonstrated a moderate ability to classify the language being spoken suggesting that rhythmic differences between languages survive even when speaker is controlled. More interesting is the fact that EMS variables could reliably classify which speaker produced each sentence even across languages. This result suggests that there are stable rhythmic structures in an individual talker’s speech that are apparent above and beyond the structural constraints of the language spoken. The EMS appears capable of describing systematic characteristics of both the talker and the language spoken. [Work supported by NIH‐NIDCD].
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