A Study of mapping distance among Korean consonants using dimension reduction algorithm
Son-A Chang, Seung Ha Oh, Seungjin Choi, Minjae Kim, Sunho Park · Audiology and Speech Research · 2012
There have been increasing needs to understand speech signals to reveal auditory processing mechanism.We investigated an optimal dimension reduction algorithm and features for reflecting distance between Korean consonants.First, we reduced features of consonant articulatory phonetics from 15 to 5-6 using three dimension reduction algorithms.This revealed 90% of the distance distribution of Korean consonants.Next, we applied the Isomap method to show the most similar acoustic features of speech banana.Results showed a useful mapping of consonant articulatory distances.For example, we found that consonant /ㅂ(p)/ and /ㄷ(t)/ share 13 out of 15 features of articulatory phonetics, with only the features of bilabial and coronal being different, suggesting that they are the most difficult to discriminate from each other and reflected in the shortest distance between these two consonants in the Isomap method.However, the Isomap method was not effective in distinguishing the acoustic features of fortis from aspirated with limited numbers of acoustic features which are using for English consonants.This study shows that the use of reduction algorithms and the Isomap method can be effective in consonant mapping of articulatory features.These findings suggest that they are useful tools in phonetics research when combined with acoustic phonetics data and real voice data.