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Higher order statistical analysis of /x/ in male speech

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Abstract

This paper presents a study of kurtosis analysis for the sound /x/ in male speech, /x/ is the sound of the ‘o’ at the end of words such as ‘ago’. The sound analysed for this paper came from the Australian National Database of Spoken Language, more specifically the male speaker 17. The /x/ was isolated and extracted from the database by the author in a quiet booth using standard multimedia software. A 5 millisecond window was used for the analysis as it was shown previously by the author to be the most appropriate size for speech phoneme analysis. The significance of the research presented here is shown in the results where a majority of coefficients had a platykurtic (kurtosis between 0 and 3) value as opposed to the previously held leptokurtic (kurtosis > 3) belief.

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Correspondence to M. C. Orr.

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Orr, M.C., Lithgow, B. Higher order statistical analysis of /x/ in male speech. Australas. Phys. Eng. Sci. Med. 28, 56 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03178865

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