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Large-Scale Acoustic Characterization of Singaporean Children's English Pronunciation

Paper · 2022 · Yuling Gu and Nancy F. Chen

Summary

Singapore English is an outer-circle variety. It has rarely been studied acoustically, and most earlier work relied on anecdotes or a handful of adult speakers. This paper measures how Singaporean children pronounce English relative to American and British children, using a much larger sample than earlier studies. The authors collected read speech from children aged 6–13 in all three populations. They force-aligned the recordings and extracted per-phoneme formants, F0 and duration with Praat. Selected vowel pairs and the approximants /l/ and /r/ were then explored with k-means and Archetypal analysis, and detailed acoustic comparisons followed. The resulting profile is mixed:

  • Like British children: Singaporean children show little rhoticity in syllable-final /r/.
  • Like American children: they front their vowels in a similar way.
  • Unlike either group: their vowel height, tense–lax contrasts and syllable-final /l/ differ from both reference groups.

The work suggests the variety draws on more than its British institutional standard, possibly through media exposure and local languages such as Malay and Chinese. This matters for speech recognition and computer-assisted language learning aimed at children.

Key points

  • Three corpora of children's read speech:

    • American: 140 speakers, 43,406 utterances
    • British: 95 speakers, 32,542 utterances
    • Singaporean: 193 speakers, 34,457 utterances

    Reading material drew on TIMIT, PF-STAR, the GMU Speech Accent Archive and custom minimal-pair sentences.

  • Processing pipeline:

    • Features were F1–F4, F0 and duration, sampled every 10 ms and averaged per phoneme.
    • A spot-check confirmed that the forced-alignment boundaries were accurate to within 50 ms.
    • Tokens that were silent, lacked formant values or lasted longer than 1 s were discarded.
    • Data were averaged to one point per speaker per phoneme.

  • Archetypal analysis used p = 2, chosen by an elbow on the residual sum of squares. K-means gave similar trends.

  • Syllable position was assigned with a syllabified CMU Pronouncing Dictionary 0.6. Vocal-tract differences were normalized with the Nordstroem and Lindblom model.

  • For TRAP–BATH vowels, more than 60% of each Singaporean vowel category fell into a single cluster. American and British vowels separated more cleanly. In Singaporean syllable-final /l/, F1 and F2 are further apart than in the other groups, and the F2–F3 gap is smaller.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Archetypal analysis describes each data point as a convex mixture of extreme "pure types", which lets two well-known varieties act as anchors for locating a third one between or outside them.
  • I2. Unsupervised clustering is used only to suggest where differences might lie, and every suggestion is then checked with targeted, interpretable measurements rather than taken at face value.
  • I3. The authors trust a pattern only when two different methods (k-means and Archetypal analysis) show the same trend.
  • I4. Tokens are averaged per speaker and per phoneme after normalizing for vocal-tract length, so that prolific speakers or anatomical differences do not masquerade as group differences.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (tree): Treebanks in different UD dialects could be placed as mixtures of two reference conventions, showing which conversion rules a new treebank actually needs.
  • I2 (learn): Clusters of parser disagreements could flag candidate phenomena, and each candidate would then be confirmed by explicit tests before any repair rule is induced.
  • I3 (learn): This mirrors agreement among witness parsers: a silver label or an evaluation conclusion would be kept only when independent methods converge.
  • I4 (answer): Test scores could be aggregated per source text or per course and normalized for text length, so that one long fable does not dominate the reported accuracy.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🔬Institute for Infocomm ResearchSingapore · Singapore43 works · 14,598 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 6The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksPsychology · 1,552 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 870 worksMedicine · 241 worksPhysiology · 29 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 worksSpeech & spoken language · 480 works

Cite

Cite as Yuling Gu and Nancy F. Chen. 2022. Large-Scale Acoustic Characterization of Singaporean Children's English Pronunciation. arXiv:2202.09108.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.48550/arxiv.2202.09108 · arXiv 2202.09108

@misc{gu2022large,
  title = {{Large-Scale Acoustic Characterization of Singaporean Children's English Pronunciation}},
  author = {Yuling Gu and Nancy F. Chen},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2202.09108},
  eprint = {2202.09108},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2202.09108}
}

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