A systematic approach to compute perceptual distribution of monosyllables

Abstract

In speech understanding, perceptual computing is widely used to quantify the perceptual properties. Previous researches on perceptual computing mainly focused on the level of phonemes (i.e. consonants and vowels). However, perceptual measurement in the level of syllables is also needed in scenarios such as speech recognition. To tackle this problem, we propose a systematic approach to calculate the perceptual distribution of monosyllables. It is composed of three parts. First, we generate a feature vector from each monosyllable based on acoustic property. Second, we construct the perceptual space based on the perception distance of every two feature vectors. Third, we measure the perceptual distribution for these monosyllables based on the perceptual space and a constraint matrix. Experiments show that 1) cluster results are in accordance with articulation position category in acoustics, 2) recognition rate of audiometry is within the standard range of performance-intensity function, 3) distribution of paracusia is consistent with the computation results of perceptual distribution.