Multivariate Statistical Analysis of Japanese VCV Utterances.

Abstract

Considering the amplitude outputs of 20-channel 1/4-octave filter analyzer of V1 CV2 utterances as the components of 20-dimensional vector, we performed multivariate analysis of variance with four factors--V1, C, V2 and speaker ; and compared the amounts of the effects of each factor within themselves. Choosing one of vowels /a, i, u, e, o/ for V1 and V2, and one of nasal consonants /m, n, ŋ/ for C, we made all the combinations with them, and five adult males were asked to utter these 75 kinds of words, which were used for the analysis. Then we inspected the relation of the variance ellipsoids of each factor along their principal axes ; signified that the notion of direction as well as amount is necessary for explaning the effects of each factor ; and compared these analysis with the principal-component analysis. Another thing we investigated by the method of regression estimate was the relation between final vowels and each section of words. Furthermore, we performed similar analysis on the basis of three-dimen-sional vectors which consist of the formant frequencies extracted from the same materials as above, and compared these with the case of spectra. The results concerning speech sounds are as follows : (1) Speaker-effect is considerably large, while consonant-effect is not so large. However, the directions of three distributions of these two effects and vowel-effect meet at nearly right angles with each other : (2) Intensive correlation is seen between vowel and speaker-factor: (3) In the case of formant frequency, the informations on any factor other than vowel-factor are being decreased as compared with the case of spectrum distribution.