Automatic Measurement and Comparison of Vowel Nasalization across Languages
نویسندگان
چکیده
We used an innovative technique to measure the trajectories of vowel nasality in three languages: English, Mandarin, and Portuguese. An SVM classifier was trained on MFCC parameters at five positions in nasal and oral vowels, and the “nasality trajectory” for each language was evaluated in terms of classification accuracy at each of the five positions. The results support the view that Portuguese vowel nasality is phonemic while English and Mandarin vowel nasality is coarticulatory, although in all cases vowel nasalization starts at the vowel onset or even earlier.
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