A study of data normalization measured by an electro-magnetic articulograph

• Published in: Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics Vol. 19; no. 1
• Main Authors: Funatsu, Seiya, Fujimoto, Masako
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: 02.06.2013
• ISSN: 1939-800X
• DOI: 10.1121/1.4799572

We investigated the normalization of the data measured using an electro-magnetic articulograph (EMA). The data normalization was needed because the size of the articulator of each subject is different from the sex and/or body size. Moreover, tongue movement range depends upon the speaking styles, clear or unclear. Our experiments were as follows: tongue tip movements during articulation of non-native consonant clusters were measured. Speakers were 2 Japanese and 2 Germans. Speech samples were 4 nonsense words, bnaht, pnaht, gnaht, knaht. Tongue tip displacement D (mm) and moving time T (ms) between first and second consonant in consonant clusters were measured. Dx (X component of D) was normalized by the difference between maximum value of X (Xmax) and minimum value of X (Xmin) in each utterance, i.e. Dnx=Dx/(Xmax-Xmin). Also Dy (Y component of D) was normalized, i.e. Dny=Dy/(Ymax-Ymin). Hence, Dn (normalized D) was Dn=(Dnx 2+Dny 2)1/2. T was normalized by word length L (ms), i.e. Tn=T/L. Before the normalization, the measured data was localized by each speaker on the T-D plane, while the normalized data was not localized on the Tn-Dn plane. Accordingly, this results suggested that this simple normalization method would be effective in this experiment.