15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)

Barcelona, Spain
August 3-9, 2003


Corpus-Based Analysis of Production and Perception of Japanese English in View of the Entire Phonemic System of English

Nobuaki Minematsu, Gakuto Kurata, Keikichi Hirose

University of Tokyo, Japan

In this paper, a method is proposed to automatically estimate the phonemic structure embedded in the pronunciation. Using two speech databases of American English and Japanese English, their structures are extracted and compared. The extraction is done only by regarding inter-phoneme relations and ignoring absolute locations of the individual phonemes in acoustic space. Comparison of the structures, however, clearly shows well-known habits observed in Japanese English. The relations also enable another interesting analysis to investigate whether the observed phonemic structure is well matched with the structure of vocabulary of English. Experimental results of the analysis show that acoustically-defined lexical density of Japanese English is approximately double that of American English.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Minematsu, Nobuaki / Kurata, Gakuto / Hirose, Keikichi (2003): "Corpus-based analysis of production and perception of Japanese English in view of the entire phonemic system of English", In ICPhS-15, 1569-1572.