Phonetics and Speech Sciences (말소리와 음성과학)

Korean Society of Speech Sciences (한국음성학회)
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A corpus-based study on the effects of voicing and gender on American English Fricatives

성대진동 및 성별이 미국영어 마찰음에 미치는 효과에 관한 코퍼스 기반 연구

  • Received : 2018.04.24
  • Accepted : 2018.05.24
  • Published : 2018.06.30
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Abstract

The paper investigates the acoustic characteristics of English fricatives in the TIMIT corpus, with a special focus on the role of voicing in rendering fricatives in American English. The TIMIT database includes 630 talkers and 2,342 different sentences, and comprises more than five hours of speech. Acoustic analyses are conducted in the domain of spectral and temporal properties by treating gender, voicing, and place of articulation as independent factors. The results of the acoustic analyses revealed that acoustic signals interact in a complex way to signal the gender, place, and voicing of fricatives. Classification experiments using a multiclass support vector machine (SVM) revealed that 78.7% of fricatives are correctly classified. The majority of errors stem from the misclassification of /θ/ as [f] and /ʒ/ as [z]. The average accuracy of gender classification is 78.7%. Most errors result from the classification of female speakers as male speakers. The paper contributes to the understanding of the effects of voicing and gender on fricatives in a large-scale speech corpus.

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References

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