Evaluation of the Speaker-Factor in Japanese VCV Utterances.

Abstract

In order to evaluate the speaker-factor in uttered words, multivariate analysis of variance for four-factor design with repeated measurements has been applied to the analysis of the spectral vectors obtained from Japanese V1CV2 utterances by 10 adult male speakers, where V1, V2=/a, i, u, e, o/ and C=/m, n, η/. The speaker, the vowel V1, the consonant C, and the vowel V2 have been assigned to the four factors, respectively, and the interaction between speaker-factor and V1, C, or V2-factor has been especially interesting in the analysis. As the results, what we should take into account as to the co-articulation of a certain phoneme are (1) the main effect of the phoneme, (2) the main effect of just preceding (or following) phoneme, (3) the interaction between the phoneme and just preceding (or following) phoneme, and (4) the main effect of the speaker-factor. The interactions between the speaker-factor and these phonemes are relatively small, and the influence of the speaker-factor to the coarticulation is not so complicated. These facts imply the possibility of the speaker-independent description about the phoneme and the rule of co-articulation.