A cross-linguistic study of speech modulation spectra

Languages show systematic variation in their sound patterns and grammars. Accordingly, they have been classified into typological categories such as stress-timed vs syllable-timed, or Head-Complement (HC) vs Complement-Head (CH). To date, it has remained incompletely understood how these linguistic properties are reflected in the acoustic characteristics of speech in different languages. In the present study, the amplitude-modulation (AM) and frequency-modulation (FM) spectra of 1797 utterances in ten languages were analyzed. Overall, the spectra were found to be similar in shape across languages. However, significant effects of linguistic factors were observed on the AM spectra. These differences were magnified with a perceptually plausible representation based on the modulation index (a measure of the signal-to-noise ratio at the output of a logarithmic modulation filterbank): the maximum value distinguished between HC and CH languages, with the exception of Turkish, while the exact frequency of this ma...