Speech Analysis: The Production-Perception Perspective

This chapter introduces the basic concepts and techniques of speech analysis from the perspectives of the underlying mechanisms of human speech production and perception. Spoken Chinese language has special characteristics in its signal properties that can be well understood in terms of both the production and perception mechanisms. In this chapter, we will first outline the general linguistic, phonetic, and signal properties of spoken Chinese. We then introduce human production and perception mechanisms, and in particular, those relevant to spoken Chinese. We also present some recent brain research on the relationship between human speech production and perception. From the perspectives of human speech production and perception, we then describe popular speech analysis techniques and classify them based on the underlying scientific principles either from the speech production or perception mechanism or from both.