Comparative Analysis of Formants of British, American and Asutralian Accents

This paper compares and quantifies the differences between formants of speech across accents. The cross entropy information measure is used to compare the differences between the formants of the vowels of three major English accents namely British, American and Australian. An improved formant estimation method, based on a linear prediction (LP) model feature analysis and a hidden Markov model (HMM) of formants, is employed for estimation of formant trajectories of vowels and diphthongs. Comparative analysis of the formant space of the three accents indicates that these accents are mostly conveyed by the first two formants. The third and fourth formants exhibit some significant differences across accents for only a few phonemes most notably the variants of vowel ‘r’ in the American (rhotic) accent compared to British (non-rhotic accent). The issue of speaker variability versus accent variability is examined by comparing the cross-entropies of speech models trained on different groups of speakers within and across the accents.