A cross-language vowel normalisation procedure

Authors

  • Geoffrey Stewart Morrison Department of Linguistics, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alta. T6G 2E7
  • Terrance M. Nearey Department of Linguistics, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alta. T6G 2E7

Keywords:

Acoustic variables measurement, Character recognition, Linguistics, Mathematical models, Optimization, Parameter estimation, Acoustic data, Vowel normalization, Vowels

Abstract

A variation of log-mean normalization that can be applied in cross-language and cross-dialect experiments, is presented. Vowel normalization procedures seek to remove inter-speaker variance due to factors such as vocal tract size, which human listeners discount while identifying vowels. It is expected that the mean vocal-tract length are approximately equal over large and sufficiently balanced samples of speakers. The cross-language normalization procedure is tested using acoustic data from productions of L1-Spanish non-low front vowels and L1 English non-low front vowels. Three models are trained and tested using non-normalized log-Hertz values, language-normalized values, and cross-language normalized values respectively. The models trained on normalized L1-English vowels had a slightly higher correct-classification rate on the training data than the model trained on non-normalized data. The vowel normalization increased the correlation between monolingual English listeners.

Additional Files

Published

2006-09-01

How to Cite

1.
Morrison GS, Nearey TM. A cross-language vowel normalisation procedure. Canadian Acoustics [Internet]. 2006 Sep. 1 [cited 2025 Feb. 15];34(3):94-5. Available from: https://jcaa.caa-aca.ca/index.php/jcaa/article/view/1838

Issue

Vol. 34 No. 3 (2006)

Section

Proceedings of the Acoustics Week in Canada

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