Acoustic comparisons of American English and Polish

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to study the long-term speech spectra density levels of comparable groups of 50 American and 50 Polish male college students. The 50 Americans read an extended prose passage; the 50 Poles read a Polish translation of the same text. In order to obtain the long-term speech spectra, analyses were performed on 23 one-third octave bands; the centre frequencies of these bands ranged from 80 to 12500 Hz. The results of the spectral analyses were normalized and used to develop power spectral density levels for both language groups. The results indicate that both the spectral density levels and the statistical distributions of the spectrum levels are similar for the two languages examined.