Impact of Frame Rates on Speech Tokenizer: A Case Study on Mandarin and English
The speech tokenizer plays a crucial role in recent speech tasks, generally serving as a bridge between speech signals and language models. While low-frame-rate codecs are widely employed as speech tokenizers, the impact of frame rates on speech tokens remains underexplored. In this study, we investigate how varying frame rates affect speech tokenization by examining Mandarin and English, two typologically distinct languages. We encode speech at different frame rates and evaluate the resulting semantic tokens in the speech recognition task. Our findings reveal that frame rate variations influence speech tokenization differently for each language, highlighting the interplay between frame rates, phonetic density, and language-specific acoustic features. The results provide insights into optimizing frame rate selection for speech tokenizers, with implications for automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech, and other speech-related applications.
View on arXiv@article{zhang2025_2505.17076,
title={ Impact of Frame Rates on Speech Tokenizer: A Case Study on Mandarin and English },
author={ Haoyang Zhang and Hexin Liu and Xiangyu Zhang and Qiquan Zhang and Yuchen Hu and Junqi Zhao and Fei Tian and Xuerui Yang and Leibny Paola Garcia and Eng Siong Chng },
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.17076},
year={ 2025 }
}