Acoustic Correlations of Speech Rhythms in Persian Based on Variability of Between-speakers Characteristics

The durational variability of phonetic intervals is considered as one of the properties of speech rhythm. These intervals include segmental, vowel, consonantal, vocalic, intervocalic, voiced, unvoiced, syllable, and syllable peak intervals. The durational variability measure for some of these intervals, such as vowel, consonantal, vocalic, intervocalic intervals, determines the classification of languages based on their rhythm. Besides, in some cases, the speaker identification is only possible through the person's voice. The segmental and suprasegmental properties of a language can be used to identify the speaker. In this study, the acoustic correlations of Persian speech rhythm in a reading text are calculated by various durational measures. Also, the between-speaker rhythmic variability is considered to find the best rhythmic measures for Persian speaker identification. The results confirm that Persian is near to the syllable-based languages. Moreover, the results from segmental and supra-segmental consideration demonstrate significant between-speaker variability in Persian. Among phonetic intervals, nPVI-VC and V% (percentage of vocalic intervals) best discriminate between-speaker variability in Persian.