Analysis, recognition, and perception of voiceless fricative consonants in Japanese

A model is described for the spectral characteristics of voiceless fricative consonants of Japanese, based on an equivalent circuit representation of their generation mechanism. The model, together with its three simplified versions, is then evaluated from the point of view of automatic recognition as well as of synthesis of speech. For automatic recognition, spectral models that contain zeros are found to be particularly effective, and their parameters are shown to be sufficient for the complete separation of /s/- and -samples in CV and VCV utterances. On the other hand, perceptual experiments using synthetic stimuli reveal considerably smaller differences between models with spectral zeros and those without zeros.