音象徴性を利用したオノマトペによる歩容の記述

抄録

There are few studies on the motion attribute of gaits because of the absence of appropriate semantic labels describing motion. We focus on onomatopoeias to describe the motion of gaits. The Japanese language is known to have a greater number of onomatopoeias in its vocabulary. Especially, the human gait is one of the most commonly represented phenomenon by onomatopoeias expressing its visually dynamic state. It is said that Japanese onomatopoeias have sound-symbolism and their phonemes are strongly related to the impression of various phenomena. Because of this, Japanese people can distinguish gaits based on their appearances and express their impressions on them briefly and intuitively using various onomatopoeias. In addition, a previous study revealed relative body-parts movement is associated with onomatopoeias when we describe gaits. Inspired by these studies, we considered that if a phonetic space based on sound-symbolism can be associated with the kinetic feature space of gaits, subtle difference of gaits could be expressed as difference in phoneme. In this paper, we propose a framework to convert the relative body-parts movements to any onomatopoeia using a regression model. This framework is expected to make human-computer interaction more intuitive. Through experiments, we confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed framework, and discussed the potential of describing an arbitrary gait by not only existing onomatopoeias but also a novel one.