Differences in Feature Parameters of Japanese Vowels with Sex and Age

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the problem of speaker differences in Japanese vowels which are the most important phonemes to recognize Japanese. 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. The former is the physical differences of the apparatus, and the latter is caused by the minute differences of articulators and the differences of linguistic environments. First of all, we investigate the speaker differences in sex and age by using many materials spoken by 120 persons, and test the existence of the inter-group differences by using a variance analysis technique. Next, we experiment on Japanese vowel recognition on the basis of the result of analyses. From these results, we obtain in conclusion that the classification of speaker classes in terms of sex and age is effective for speaker independent vowel recognition and that the 3 classes of male, female and children are the best kind as speaker-grouping ways.