On the Relationship between Accent Strength and Articulatory Features

TL;DR

This study investigates how accent strength relates to articulatory features using acoustic analysis and self-supervised learning, revealing systematic articulatory differences between American and British English dialects.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework combining phonetic comparison and articulatory inversion techniques to quantify and analyze accent strength from speech data.

Findings

Tongue positioning patterns differ between dialects.

Significant differences observed in rhotic and low back vowels.

Articulatory features can distinguish accent strength and dialects.

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between accent strength and articulatory features inferred from acoustic speech. To quantify accent strength, we compare phonetic transcriptions with transcriptions based on dictionary-based references, computing phoneme-level difference as a measure of accent strength. The proposed framework leverages recent self-supervised learning articulatory inversion techniques to estimate articulatory features. Analyzing a corpus of read speech from American and British English speakers, this study examines correlations between derived articulatory parameters and accent strength proxies, associating systematic articulatory differences with indexed accent strength. Results indicate that tongue positioning patterns distinguish the two dialects, with notable differences inter-dialects in rhotic and low back vowels. These findings contribute to automated accent analysis and articulatory modeling for speech processing applications.