Cued Speech (CS) is a communication system developed for deaf people, which exploits hand cues to complement speechreading at the phonetic level. Currently, it is estimated that CS has been adapted to over 60 languages; however, no official CS system is available for Mandarin Chinese. This article proposes a novel and efficient Mandarin Chinese CS system, satisfying the main criterion that the hand coding constitutes a complement to the lips movements. We propose to code vowels [i, u, y] as semiconsonants when they are followed by other Mandarin finals, which reduces the number of Mandarin finals to be coded from 36 to 16. We establish a coherent similarity between Mandarin Chinese and French vowels for the remaining 16 vowels, which allows us to take advantage of the French CS system. Furthermore, by investigating the lips viseme distribution based on a new corpus, an optimal allocation of the 16 Mandarin vowels to different hand positions is obtained. A Gaussian classifier was used to evaluate the average separability of different allocated vowel groups, which gives 92.08\%, 92.33\%, and 92.73\% for the three speakers, respectively. The consonants are mainly designed according to their similarities with the French CS system, as well as some considerations on the special Mandarin consonants. In our system, the tones of Mandarin are coded with head movements.

中文翻译：

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普通话提示语音的初步研究

提示语音（CS）是为聋人开发的一种通信系统，它利用手势提示来补充语音级的语音阅读。目前，估计CS已适应60多种语言；但是，没有官方的CS系统可用于普通话。本文提出了一种新颖有效的普通话CS系统，满足了主要的标准，即手编码是对嘴唇运动的补充。我们建议将元音[i，u，y]编码为半辅音，然后再跟其他汉语普通话进行编码，这样可以将要编码的普通话决赛的数量从36个减少到16个。我们在汉语和法语元音之间建立了一致的相似性剩下的16个元音，这使我们可以利用法语CS系统。此外，通过研究基于新语料库的嘴唇视位素分布，可以获得16个普通话元音在不同手部位置的最佳分配。使用高斯分类器评估不同分配的元音组的平均可分离性，这三个说话者分别给出92.08％，92.33％和92.73％。辅音主要是根据与法语CS系统的相似性以及对特殊普通话辅音的一些考虑而设计的。在我们的系统中，普通话的音调是随头部运动进行编码的。分别。辅音主要是根据与法语CS系统的相似性以及对特殊普通话辅音的一些考虑而设计的。在我们的系统中，普通话的音调是随头部运动进行编码的。分别。辅音主要是根据与法语CS系统的相似性以及对特殊普通话辅音的一些考虑而设计的。在我们的系统中，普通话的音调是随头部运动进行编码的。