Detecting determinism in speech phonemes

This paper presents a discriminating approach to detecting the existence of underlying determinism in speech phonemes using the surrogate data method. The discrimination is made using a statistical measurement of neighboring trajectory directions. This approach is experimentally verified with both deterministic and stochastic time series and then applied to speech phonemes from the TIMIT database. The results show that vowels present some degree of determinism, while no evidence is observed showing that determinism exists with either voiced or unvoiced fricatives.