A Fuzzy Model for Analysing Perceptual Vowel Space: The Case of Modern Persian

Hemmatnia, Shirin Zahra; Ghazanfari, Mehdi; Nourbakhsh, Mandana

A Fuzzy Model for Analysing Perceptual Vowel Space: The Case of Modern Persian

Document Type : .

Authors

Abstract

The article proposes a fuzzy approach to Modern Persian perceptual vowel space. The theory of fuzzy sets is based on multi-valued logic, in which a category has no sharp boundary, so a membership function plays a key role. To achieve our goal, we carried out an acoustic experiment. A number of 96*2 synthetic stimuli of the six vowels in Modern Persian (/i,e,a,ɑ,o,u/) were examined through an Identification test. Each of the stimuli was randomly played twice for twenty participants (10 males and 10 females) and the values of the vowels’ first two formants (F1 and F2) were recorded. Based on the collected data, not only were the “crisp values” and “fuzzy values” of vowels tabulated, but the areas of “auditory clarity” and “auditory vagueness” around each vowel were also identified. The results showed that the vowel continuum between two adjacent vowels were vaguely perceived by the participants. It was concluded that fuzzy vowels have no clearly defined boundaries. In other words, they may contain partial degrees of membership denoted by a real number that ranges from zero (meaning no membership) to one (meaning complete membership). Moreover, the fuzzy sets theory proved to have the ability to calculate and explicate the overlapping vowels in the vowel space.

Keywords

References

بی‌جن‌خان، محمود و محمدعلی غفوریان (1375). «آموزش و بازشناسی خودکار طبقات واجی در گفتار پیوستۀ فارسی با استفاده از منطق فازی». کنفرانس بین‌المللی سیستم‌های هوشمند و شناختی: سمپوزیوم سیستم‌های فازی، پژوهشکده سیستم‌های هوشمند و IEE، 50-45.

بی‌جن‌خان، محمود (1392). نظام آوایی زبان فارسی. چاپ اول. تهران: سمت.

حق‌بین، فریده (1379). «مبانی توصیف زبان، منطق ارسطویی یا منطق فازی؟». تهران: بیدار، فروردین و اردیبهشت 1380، شماره 6، 29-33.

رحمانی، حامد (1389). «آزمون‌های درک گفتار». پایان نامه کارشناسی ارشد. دانشگاه تهران.

غضنفری، مهدی و محمود رضایی (1389). مقدمه‌ای بر نظریه مجموعه‌های فازی. تهران: مرکز انتشارات دانشگاه علم و صنعت ایران.

غضنفری، مهدی و زهره کاظمی (1393). اصول و مبانی سیستم‌های خبره. تهران: مرکز انتشارات دانشگاه علم و صنعت ایران.

مک‌مورای، باب (1398). سنتز گفتار، مروری بر اپلیکیشن KlattWorks و نرم‌افزارهای جانبی آن. ترجمه: شیرین‌زهرا همت‌نیا و ماندانا نوربخش. تهران: انتشارات سیاهرود.

Bell-Berti, F., L. J. Raphael, D. B. Pisoni, & J. R. Sawusch (1979). “Some relationships between speech production and perception”. Phonetica. 36, 373-383.

Black, M. (1973), “Vagueness: An exercise in logic analysis”. Philosophy of science. 4:427-455.

Boersma, P., & D. Weenink (2017). Praat: doing phonetics by computer (version 6.0.28) [Computer software]. from http://www.praat.org/

Buchvar, D. A. (1938). “On a three valued calculus and its application to the analysis of contradictories”. Matematicheskii Sbornik 4(2): 287-308.

Cox, S. J. (1990). “Hidden Markov Models for automatic speech recognition: Theory and application”. Speech and language processing. C. Wheddon & R. Linggard (Eds.), London: Chapman and Hall, 209-230.

Delattre, P., A. M. Liberman, F. S. Cooper, & L. Gerstman (1952). "An Experimental Study of Observation on One- and Two-Formant Vowel Synthesized from Spectrographic Patterns". Word. 8(3), 195-210.

Fry, D.B., Abramson, A., Eimas, P. & Liberman, A. (1962). “The identification and discrimination of synthetic vowels”. Language and Speech, 5, 171-189.

Fujisaki, H. & T. Kawashima (1968). “The roles of pitch and higher formants in the perception of vowels”. IEEE transactions on audio and electro-acoustic. AU-16, 73-77

Hall C. (2016). "The Perception of the /a/-/ɛ/ Vowel Continuum in British and United States English Speakers". University of Oxford. www.academia.edu

Harington J. (2010). “Acoustic phonetics”. The handbook of phonetic sciences, 2, 81-129.

Heisenberg, W. (1958). Physics and Philosophy. New York: Harper & row.

Heyward, K. (2000), Experimental Phonetics. Harlow: Pearson Education.

Hillenbrand, J., L. A. Getty, M. J. Clark, & K. Wheeler (1995). “Acoustic characteristics of American English vowels”. The Journal of the Acoustical society of America. 97, 3099-3111.

Klatt, D. H. (1983). "Human and automatic speech recognition". Proceedings of the 10th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. M. P. R. van den Broecke & A. Cohen (Eds.), Dordrecht: Foris, 183-186.

Kleene, S. (1952). Many-valued logic. Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu

Ladefoged, P., & D. E. Broadbent (1957). "Information conveyed by vowels". The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 29, 98-104.

Ladefoged, P. & K. Johnson (2011). A course in phonetics. Seventh edition, Cengage learning, Standford, USA.

Ladefoged, P. & I. Maddieson (1999). The sounds of the world’s languages. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Levinson, S. E., & M. Y. Liberman (1981). "Speech recognition by computer". Scientific American. 244(4), 64-76.

Luengo, I., E. Navas, & I. Hernáez (2010). "Feature analysis and evaluation for automatic emotion identification in speech". IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. 12(6), 490-501.

Łukasiewicz, J. & A. Tarski, A. (1930). Untersuchungen über den Aussagenkalkül. Comptes Rendus des Séances de la Sociélé des Scierices et des Lettres des Varsovie Classe III, 23, 30-50.

McMurray, B. (2013). KlattWorks: A [somewhat] new systematic approach to formant-based speech synthesis for empirical research. [Computer Aplication]

Miller, J. D. (1989). “Auditory-perceptual interpretation of the vowel”. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 85, 2114-2134.

Miller, G. A., & P. E. Nicely (1955). “An analysis of perceptual confusions among some English consonants”. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 27, 338–352.

Oosthuizen, D. & J. Hanekom (2015). “Fuzzy Information transmission analysis for continuous speech features”. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 137(4), 1983-1994.

Pal, S. K., A. K. Datta, & D. Majumder (1978). “Adaptive learning algorithm in classification of fuzzy patterns: An application to vowels in CNC context”. International Journal of Systems Science. 9: 887-897.

Peterson, G. E. & H. L. Barney (1952). "Control methods used in the study of vowels". The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 24, 175-184.

Raptis, S. & G. Carayannis (1997). “Fuzzy logic for rule-based formant speech synthesis”. EuroSpeech97 Proceedings. Rhodes, Greece, vol. 3, 1599-1602.

Russell, B. (1923). “Vagueness”. The Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy. 1: 84-92.

Taleb, A. & A. Benyettou (2010). “Arabic vowels fuzzy neural network recognition”. Journal of Applied Sciences. 10: 848-851.

Tripathy, H. K., B. K. Tripathy, & K. Pradip (2008). “A knowledge based approach using fuzzy inference rules for vowel recognition”. Journal of Convergence Information Technology. 3: 51-56.

Zadeh, L. A. (1965). “Fuzzy Sets”. Information and Control. 8:338–353.

Zimmermann, H.-J. (2010). “Fuzzy set theory”. WIREs Computational Statistics. Vol. 2, Issue 3, Wiley Periodicals, Inc, 317-332.