Tibetan vowel analysis with a multi-modal Mandarin-Tibetan speech corpus

摘要

This paper reports on the construction of a multi-modal Mandarin-Tibetan speech database collected from native speakers of WeiZang dialect. The Mandarin-Tibetan corpus contains 41 Tibetan sentences, 27 Chinese sentences, 30 Tibetan consonants, 4 Tibetan vowels, and 25 Tibetan monosyllables. A multi-modal data collection system was established, which comprises an ultrasound scanner, high-speed camera, and electromagnetic articulography. The vowel system of the Tibetan language was analyzed too describe the acoustic space as well as the articulatory space. The Tibetan vowel space was also compared with Mandarin vowel space and English vowel space. The results show that Tibetan vowel space is more similar to Mandarin vowel space than to English.