A Cross-Gender Statistical Analysis of Tuvinian Intonation Features in Comparison With Uzbek and Azerbaijani

The paper deals with cross-gender and cross-linguistic comparison of pitch characteristics for Tuvinian with two other Turkic languages - Uzbek and Azerbaijani, based on the results of statistical analysis of pitch parameter values and intonation patterns used by male and female speakers.

The main goal of our work is to obtain the ranges of pitch parameter values typical for Tuvinian speakers for the purpose of automatic language identification. We also propose a cross-gender analysis of declarative intonation in the poorly studied Tuvinian language.

The ranges of pitch parameter values were obtained by means of specially developed software that deals with the distribution of pitch values and allows us to obtain statistical language-specific pitch intervals.





References:
[1] S. L. Koval, P. V. Labutin, T. S. Pekhovskiy, E. A. Proshchina, N. S. Smirnova, A. O. Talanov, "Composite Forensic Speaker Identification Method," in Dialog-2007, http://www.dialog-21.ru/digests/dialog2007/materials/html/39.htm.
[2] N. S. Smirnova, "Speaker identification based on the comparison of utterance pitch contour parameters," in Dialog-2007, http://www.dialog21.ru/digests/dialog2007/materials/pdf/77.pdf H. Poor, An Introduction to Signal Detection and Estimation. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1985, ch. 4.
[3] Yu. Matveev, "The Problem of Voice Template Aging in Speaker Recognition Systems”, LNCS/LNAI, vol. 8113, pp. 345–353, 2013.
[4] A. P. Simpson, "Phonetic differences between male and female speech", Language and Linguistic Compass, vol. 3, March 2009.
[5] E. Pepiot, "Voice, speech and gender: male-female acoustic differences and cross-language variation in English and French speakers," http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/76/48/11/PDF/Article_Pepiot_RJC_2012_-_Pre-Print.pdf.
[6] M. Khitrov, L. Beldiman, A. Vasiliev, "Statistical Language Aspects of Intonation and Gender Features Based on the Lithuanian Language," Speech and Computer: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol.8113, pp. 327-332, 2013.
[7] J. D. O'Connor, G. F. Arnold, "Intonation of Colloquial English," Longman, London, 1973.
[8] E. A. Bryzgunova, "Intonation", in "Russian Grammar", vol. 1, pp. 96 - 123, 1980"Russian Grammar", vol. 1, pp. 96 – 123.