Objective Hand Complexity Comparison between Two Mandarin Chinese Cued Speech Systems

Recently, a pilot Mandarin Chinese Cued Speech (MCCS) system, called MCCS-1 was proposed with a main characteristic that each vowel is coded by only one specific hand position, without using any hand slides to code diphthongs. Indeed, hand slides are also used in some other languages of CS to code diphthongs. In order to demonstrate that the MCCS-1 system possesses real advantages over systems using hand slides, in this work, we first propose a novel MCCS-2 by introducing hand slides to code diphthongs, and a “push out move” for ending consonants [n] or [ng] of nasalized vowels. Then, we present a multi-parameter hand complexity measure method to compare MCCS-1 and MCCS-2 by measuring three kinematic parameters, which are the time duration of words realization, hand move trajectory length and average speed of hand movements. Moreover, the first MCCS corpus for these two systems is recorded by three speakers specifically for this work. A statistical analysis of this database shows a superior performance of MCCS-1 since it costs less time and takes a shorter hand move trajectory length than MCCS-2. A strong correlation is observed between the complexity of hand movement and the time duration of word realization.