A New Vowel Normalization for Sociophonetics

Description

Several studies have shown that in sociophonetic research
Lobanov’s speaker normalization method outperforms other
methods for normalizing vowel formants of speakers. An ad-
vantage of Lobanov’s method compared to the method that was
introduced by Watt & Fabricius in 2002 is that it is independent
of the shape of the vowel space area, and also normalizes to
the dispersion of the vowels. However, it does depend on the
distribution of the vowels within the vowel space. When us-
ing Lobanov normalization the formant values are converted to
z-scores. We present a method where the μ in the z-score for-
mula is replaced by the center of the convex hull that encloses
the vowels, and the σ is obtained on the basis of the points that
constitute the convex hull. When normalizing measurements of
two real data sets, and of a series of randomly generated data
sets, we found that our method improved in matching vowel
spaces in size and overlap.

Period	03 Sept 2021
Event title	Interspeech 2021
Event type	Conference
Location	Brno, Czech RepublicShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International