Spectral Emphasis as an Additional Source of Information in Accent Detection

This study deals with the relevance of spectral emphasis for accent detection. Spectral emphasis may be described as an acoustic feature reflecting the relative intensity in the higher frequency bands. In an experiment using a rudimentary accent detector, spectral emphasis was shown to be more useful for the detection of accents than overall intensity. Furthermore, spectral emphasis was found to outperform f0 in certain conditions. It is argued here, therefore, that it might be worthwhile to include spectral emphasis in systems using a combination of acoustic features for automatic classification of prosodic categories.