Last modified: 2011-07-25
Abstract
This is a preliminary investigation of the linguistic idiosyncrasy manifested in language use in spoken Japanese. More precisely, focusing on function words, such as particles, coordinators, etc., we aim to find out to what extend we are idiosyncratic in selecting certain function words above others, keeping in mind that there may be some differences in the degree/nature of idiosyncrasy between the sexes.
The author (2010) demonstrated that Japanese fillers (‘um’, ‘you know’, ‘like’ in English) bear the idiosyncratic information of speakers to the extend that the accuracy of speaker classification based solely on fillers can be as high as c.a. 85% for male speakers and c.a. 75% for female speakers, speaker classification performance being worse in the female than the male speakers by c.a. 10% due to the tendency for female speakers to have larger within-speaker differences than the male speakers.
The current study looks beyond fillers, and investigates some function words in Japanese, such as particles, coordinators, etc. This is because some previous studies on English reported speakers’ idiosyncrasy in selecting function words (Weber et al., 2002). In the current study, we use the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (Maekawa et al., 2000).
References
K. Maekawa, H. Koiso, S. Furui, and H. Isahara. 2000. Spontaneous Speech Corpus of Japanese. Proceedings of the Second International Conference of Language Resources and Evaluation, 947–952.
F. Weber, L. Manganaro, B. Peskin and E. Shriberg. 2002. Using Prosodic And Lexical Information For Speaker Identification. Proceedings of the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing 2002, 141-144.