This paper proposes a formant-based approach for computer-assisted English vowel assessment. Various studies in formant-based speech synthesis have suggested the importance of formant coefficients; this motivates us to investigate pronunciation assessment using formant information instead of MFCC (Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients) alone. In particular, we explore the multistream HMM with the...

Single-formant dynamically changing harmonic vowel analogs, a target with a single frequency excursion and a longer distracter with a different fundamental frequency and repeated excursions were generated to assess informational and energetic masking of target transitions in young and elderly listeners. Results indicate the presence of informational masking that is significant only for formant ...

Noise-vocoded (NV) speech is often regarded as conveying phonetic information primarily through temporal-envelope cues rather than spectral cues. However, listeners may infer the formant frequencies in the vocal-tract output-a key source of phonetic detail-from across-band differences in amplitude when speech is processed through a small number of channels. The potential utility of this spectra...

The general literature on the phonetic correlates of stress agrees that duration, and in stress accent languages, F0 are consistent correlates of stress. However, the role of amplitude changes in the speech signal is more controversial. In particular, the conflicting results of spectral tilt as a correlate of stress have been attributed to the effects of vowel reduction. We examined the stress ...

We studied tongue positions of vowels in oral and nasal contexts. In the previous study [Arai, J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 115, p.2541 (2004)], formant frequencies were measured and bidirectional formant shifts in F1 frequency were observed: increasing F1 for high vowels and decreasing F1 for low vowels. Then, we tried to answer to the next question, that is, whether or not speakers and/or listeners c...

Research indicates that, when the first and second formants of a vowel are separated by less than about 3.5 Bark, perception of its height and some other aspects of its quality is determined by some weighted average of the low-frequency spectrum, rather than by particular harmonic or hypothetical formant frequencies (as is the case with more widely spaced formants). This spectral averaging has ...

Formant frequencies have rarely been used as acoustic features for speech recognition, in spite of their phonetic significance. For some speech sounds one or more of the formants may be so badly defined that it is not useful to attempt a frequency measurement. Also, it is often difficult to decide which formant labels to attach to particular spectral peaks. This paper describes a new method of ...

The traditional approaches for formant frequency estimation are misled by spectral peaks in unvoiced speech and perform very poorly in transient background noise. Also, these traditional algorithms are not robust in real life noise environment and are unable to recover quickly after periods of silence. Robust formant tracking algorithm is discussed. Testing of the algorithm using various speech...

This paper describes how formant frequencies of voiced and unvoiced speech can be predicted from mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) vectors using maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation within a hidden Markov model (HMM) framework. Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) are used to model the local joint density of MFCCs and formant frequencies. More localised prediction is achieved by modelling s...

We use the lossy electric transmission—line analog model of the vocal tract to study the acoustics of speech produced in a hyperbaric helium— oxygen atmosphere. The analysis extends previous work by including more completely the effects of the wall vibration, glottal, and radiation impedances, and by analyzing the formant bandwidths and amplitudes in addition to the formant frequencies. It show...