Comparing Prosody Across Many Languages

An empirical metric is developed to measure similarity or distance between the prosodic systems of diverse languages. Two physical variables which carry prosodic information, F0 and amplitude envelope modulation, are used as inputs in a pairwise language discrimination task. A novel neural network model is trained to discriminate among pairs of languages drawn from a set of ten languages in a telephone speech database. Network performance is used to obtain a distance metric for each pair, allowing overall similarity relationships within the 10 language set to be identi ed. Results are presented for F0 alone, in which Mandarin and Japanese are found to be clearly distinguished from all other languages in the database, and French is found to be clearly distinguishable, even from related Indo-European languages. Using amplitude envelope modulation alone, a cluster of languages usually described as syllable-timed is identi ed. Vietnamese and Farsi are found to be rhythmically distinct from languages conventionally described as stress-, syllableor mora-timed. When both variables are provided to the networks, the results provide an empirical measure of prosodic distance among the languages. PACS numbers: 43.70.Kv 43.72.Bs