Proc. of the International Conf. on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP), Vol. 3, pp. 750-753, Beijing, 2000
The effect of reduced spectral information on Japanese consonant perception: Comparison between L1 and L2 listeners
M. Komatsu, W. Tokuma, S. Tokuma and T. Arai
Abstract: We investigated how spectral information contributes to the perception of Japanese consonants, using re-synthesised samples that were created by (1) gradually reducing the order of LPC analysis in the residual excited LPC vocoder; and (2) gradually flattening the spectral peak in the frequency domain. The results of native Japanese speakers showed that the information in LPC residuals contributes significantly, if not sufficiently, to Japanese consonant perception, and that the minimum amount of spectral information is sufficient to achieve 90% identification score. It was also found that, although the perceptual error patterns were different, there were striking similarities between Japanese and non-Japanese listeners in their averaged perception scores. The phonological feature analysis of the perceptual results indicated that the residuals provide broad phonotactic information such as major class features.