Characterizing Rhythm Differences between Strong and Weak Accented L2 Speech
Abstract:
This study examined the rhythmic characteristics of accented L2 speech by using two relatively novel measures of prosodic rhythm: The S-AMPH measure, an index of the degree of synchrony between the stress and syllable amplitude modulation rates; and the Allan Factor measure, that determines the nested clustering of temporal events (in this case peaks in the amplitude envelope) over different timescales. An extreme-group design was used to select strong versus weak foreign accent recordings from a group of Korean and French L2 English talkers saying the same 69-word English passage. For the Korean talkers, both the S-AMPH and the Allan Factor measures differed as a function of the strength of foreign accent. This was not the case for the French talkers, where neither measure differed as a function of the strength of the foreign accent. The difference in outcome between the Korean and French talkers suggests that the measures may not be indexing a general property of L2 accent (e.g., production fluency) but rather that they may be picking up a property specific to the strongly accented Korean talkers. We consider several options.
Cite as: Davis, C., Kim, J. (2018) Characterizing Rhythm Differences between Strong and Weak Accented L2 Speech. Proc. Interspeech 2018, 2568-2572, DOI: 10.21437/Interspeech.2018-1798.
BiBTeX Entry:
@inproceedings{Davis2018,
author={Chris Davis and Jeesun Kim},
title={Characterizing Rhythm Differences between Strong and Weak Accented L2 Speech},
year=2018,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2018},
pages={2568--2572},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2018-1798},
url={http://dx.doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2018-1798} }