Speech production processes in the mina

One might ask whether the formants of a vowel are essential to characterize its pattern of perception. This question has occupied us since we began to develop our monosyllabic voice typewriter. If the formants are not essential, there might be some other possible ways to realize better discrimination of vowels for the development of the automatic recognition of speech and speech synthesis. To find a possible answer to this problem, we recorded the imitation of human speech by a mina and the speech of the person who taught the mina. Comparing the formants of each Japanese vowel in the mina and in the man, it was found that the first format was not an essential factor to characterize the perception and the pronunciation of vowels. In addition, the number of zero crossings was also different in the mina and in the man. Hence, a vocal tract model was not concluded to be essential for speech analysis. By eliminating the different speech production factors in the man and in the mina, we tried to find a new conc...