![]() ![]() Ueda and Nakajima analysed critical-band-filtered power fluctuations of speech signals in eight different spoken languages/dialects, and obtained three factors common to all of these languages/dialects. We were particularly interested in whether the three-factor spectral representation of speech sounds reported by Ueda and Nakajima 2 could be related to phonological categories such as vowels and consonants, or as sonorants and obstruents 1. However, there are hardly any acoustically-based investigations of phonemes from such a viewpoint. ![]() The concept of the syllable 1 is important to understand how speech phonemes are connected with one another in time. These factors turned out to connect the linguistic and acoustic aspects of speech sounds systematically. The latter factor highly correlated with the hypothetical concept of sonority or aperture in phonology. Here we show the three general categories of the English phonemes, i.e., vowels, sonorant consonants, and obstruents, to be discriminable in the Cartesian space constructed by these factors: A factor related to frequency components above 3,300 Hz was associated only with obstruents (e.g., /k/ or /z/), and another factor related to frequency components around 1,100 Hz only with vowels (e.g., /a/ or /i/) and sonorant consonants (e.g., /w/, /r/, or /m/). Examining linguistic implications of these factors seems important to understand how speech sounds carry linguistic information. Acoustic analyses of eight different languages/dialects had revealed a language universal: Three spectral factors consistently appeared in analyses of power fluctuations of spoken sentences divided by critical-band filters into narrow frequency bands. ![]()
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