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Vowel Intelligibility in Chinese

McLoughlin, Ian Vince (2010) Vowel Intelligibility in Chinese. Ieee Transactions On Audio Speech And Language Processing, 18 (1). pp. 117-125. ISSN 1558-7916. (doi:10.1109/TASL.2009.2024381) (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:48822)

The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided.
Official URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TASL.2009.2024381

Abstract

Conventional wisdom states that, since the average amplitude of vowel articulation significantly exceeds that for consonants, an assessment of spoken intelligibility in obscuring noise should primarily be limited by consonant confusion. Furthermore, in both English and Chinese, consonant discrimination is considered to be more important to overall intelligibility than that of vowels. In the unbounded case, the assumption that vowel confusion is less important than consonant confusion may well be true; however, at least two situations exist where the influence of vowel confusion may be greater. The first is where vocabulary-specific restrictions confine the structure of a particular spoken word to alternatives differing primarily in their vowel. The second is the prevalence of non-additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) interference, particularly impulsive noise which obscures only the vowel portion of a word, and similarly is present as a nonlinear effect of many time-sliced processing algorithms. This paper explores the issue of vowel intelligibility for spoken Chinese, where the confusion characteristics are complicated through the influence of lexical tone carried by the vowel in consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) structure utterances. Experimental evidence from multilistener intelligibility testing are presented to build toward an understanding of the characteristics of Mandarin Chinese vowel confusion in the presence of AWGN. Results are also isolated by carrier word consonants and in terms of the lexical tone overlaid upon tested vowels. In particular, several factors relating to issues such as vowel length, tone combination and the crucial influence of the /a/ (IPA phone are revealed.

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.1109/TASL.2009.2024381
Uncontrolled keywords: chinese, consonant, intelligibility, mandarin, tone, vowel
Subjects: T Technology
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Computing, Engineering and Mathematical Sciences > School of Computing
Depositing User: Ian McLoughlin
Date Deposited: 07 Sep 2015 15:30 UTC
Last Modified: 16 Nov 2021 10:19 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/48822 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

University of Kent Author Information

McLoughlin, Ian Vince.

Creator's ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7111-2008
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