Cross-linguistic analysis of speech rhythm with decomposition of the amplitude envelope
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1
University of Kent, English Language and Linguistics, United Kingdom
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2
Cornell University, Linguistics, United States
This paper presents a new approach to characterizing speech rhythm, based upon empirical mode decomposition (EMD) [Huang etal., Proc. R. Soc. London Ser. A 454, 903–995 (1998)]. Intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) are obtained from EMD of a vocalic energy envelope of speech, which is a smoothly varying signal, representing primary vocalic resonance energy. EMD uses an iterative sifting process to decompose the signal into IMFs with zero mean and zero-crossings between extrema. Investigations of IMFs revealed that the last two IMFs appear to capture foot- and syllable-timescale oscillations in the envelope, respectively, while the ratio of signal power in the foot- and syllable-associated IMFs can be used as a metric of the relative influence of foot-based timing on speech. EMD was applied to speech corpora of English, German, Greek, Italian, Korean, and Spanish obtained from eight speakers of each language with three elicitation methods: read sentences, read running text, and spontaneous speech. For all languages, the metrics indicate that spontaneous speech exhibits more “stress-timing” like characteristics than read speech, having higher interval variability and more dominant stress-timescale periodicity in the envelope. Cross-linguistic differences emerged in some cases, but these were not entirely consistent across metrics and were affected by the elicitation method. Overall the data suggest that the elicitation effects (i.e., read versus spontaneous speech) are larger than differences between languages. These similarities between languages further indicate the presence of a common basis for speech rhythm–quite likely foot structure–crosslinguistically.
Acknowledgements
We thank UCSD Speech Lab members Younah Chung, Noah Girgis, Page Piccinini, Tristie Ross and Nadav Sofer for help with data collection and analysis. The financial support of the UCSD Committee on Research through Grant no. LIN201G to Amalia Arvaniti with Tristie Ross as GSR is hereby gratefully acknowledged.
Keywords:
speech rhythm,
Empirical Mode Decomposition,
rhythm classes,
english,
German,
Greek,
Korean,
Italian,
spanish
Conference:
14th Rhythm Production and Perception Workshop Birmingham 11th - 13th September 2013, Birmingham, United Kingdom, 11 Sep - 13 Sep, 2013.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Rhythm Production and Perception
Citation:
Arvaniti
A and
Tilsen
S
(2013). Cross-linguistic analysis of speech rhythm with decomposition of the amplitude envelope.
Conference Abstract:
14th Rhythm Production and Perception Workshop Birmingham 11th - 13th September 2013.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2013.214.00026
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Received:
15 Jul 2013;
Published Online:
24 Sep 2013.
*
Correspondence:
Prof. Amalia Arvaniti, University of Kent, English Language and Linguistics, Canterbury, United Kingdom, a.arvaniti@kent.ac.uk