Calculation of Phonetic Distances between Speech Sounds

ABSTRACT A new formalism to numerically measure phonetic differences between speech sounds treating feature values of the compared phones as independent parameters that give rise to corresponding Euclidean distances is put forward. The articulatory and acoustic methods within this formalism were compared, where the corresponding results display good agreement. The more reliable and more universal character of the acoustic approach is provided by robust and precise acoustic parameters used therein. The theoretical model and the findings of this article comply also with the experimental phonetic results. The proposed approach contributes to formalization of the procedure of phone comparison and mapping needed for automatic text and speech processing.