Impressions formed by timing of utterance of Japanese monosyllables

The authors previously reported a subjective evaluation and analysis using natural voices as stimuli pronounced by Japanese native speakers as nonsense syllables. The relationships between the physical pitches of the voices and their psychological indices were confirmed. In this paper, to examine the relationship between the psychological indices and another physical parameter, the timing of utterance, voices used in the previous report as stimuli were analyzed. The voices were digitized, and the moving average powers were subsequently calculated. Three standards were defined to measure the tempo of utterance from the power waveforms, and relationships between the tempo of utterance and psychological indices extracted as principal components in the previous report were examined. One of the three kinds of timing indices correlated with a different psychological index from the index with which the other two correlated. The results suggest that voices with various impressions can be composed by controlling the timings of the utterance independently.