A SIMPLE GEOMETRICAL STRUCTURE UNDERLYING SPEECH SIGNALS OF THE JAPANESE VOWEL /a/
We provide several pieces of evidence for possible chaotic dynamics in the irregular behavior of normal speech signals of the Japanese vowel /a/. First, principal component analysis demonstrates that a simple geometric structure underlying the complex speech signal is well reconstructed in a three-dimensional delay-coordinate space. Observations of the reconstructed speech trajectory at multiple cross sections also display speech dynamics with stretching, folding and compressing. Second, Lyapunov spectrum analysis indicates sensitive dependence on initial conditions with a positive Lyapunov exponent for the speech signals of several different speakers. Third, nonlinear modeling analysis with an artificial neural network shows that the nonlinear dynamics of the vowel sound is well reproduced by a deterministic dynamical model.