Correlation Analysis of Speaker Differences in Vowels, Consonants and Spoken Digits.

Abstract

The speaker differences are divided into two kinds. One is inter-group differences--speaker differences in age and sex. The other is intra-group differences--speaker differences in the same generation and sex. The former is the physical differences of the apparatus (most of hardware differences). The latter is further divided into two types. They are the minute differences of articulators (part of hardware differences) and the differences of linguistic environments or articulation (software differences). In this paper, we investigate the property of intra-group speaker differences (adult males) caused by hardware-factor and software-factor through correlation analyses between voices on speaker-factor. From experiments we find the following : 1) the speaker differences caused by physical differences in vowels, consonants and spoken digits are not random (structural), 2) the speaker differences of articulation in spoken digits are also not random, 3) the speaker differences of a spoken digit in which a vowel may be uttered by the manner of devocalization are influenced by the differences of artiuclation, and 4) the correlation between voiced consonants except /z/ is large, but that between a voiced consonant and an unvoiced consonant except plosive consonants is small.