A new method for the objective perceptual measurement of Chinese initials

Many works have been done in the methods of the perception measurements for speech sound. However, most of them are subjective measurement alone for perception aspects. In this paper, we try to give a new method of objective perception measurement for Chinese initials and investigate the relationship between the acoustic features and the perception measurement. To do so, we discuss which acoustic features and their combinations are the most consistent with the real perception of Chinese initials. We propose a method to obtain an objective perception measure based on the acoustic features, where the acoustic distance has a monotonic relation with the perceptual distance for Chinese initials. The Spearman´s rank correlation coefficient is enhanced from 0.6328 to 0.6498 by adding the time-domain features to the feature vector of each initial. Finally, we propose a new formula to measure the perceptual distance between different types of initials objectively by using the chosen acoustic features.