Why does the presence of a strong accent typically lead to a broadened acoustic spectrum during speech processing, affecting automatic speech recognition (ASR) accuracy?

💡 Explanation

A strong accent increases the allophonic range used by a speaker, thus widening the acoustic spectrum for each perceived phoneme because of increased variation in pronunciation. Therefore, ASR systems struggle to match these broadened spectra to canonical forms, rather than simplified spectral analysis or reduced coarticulation being the cause.

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