A clustering analysis of Chinese consonants based on functional load

Abstract

This paper attempts to provide some insights about the relationship between the differentiability and the classification importance of consonants in Chinese speech communication. The two characteristics can be modelled by the perceptual distance and the functional load respectively. We have a clustering analysis of Chinese consonants based on functional load (FL) relied on mutual information (MI) between the text and its phoneme transcription. Then we compare our clustering result with that based on the perceptual distance by articulation tests. By experimenting on the Chinese newspaper corpus with millions of sentences, we find most phonemes at the same place of articulation with different manners tend to have large FLs pairwise. It is consistent with the result that those phonemes tend to have long perceptual distance pairwise.