We report two experiments in which vowels and steady-state consonants served as targets in a speeded detection task. In the first experiment, two vowels were compared with one voiced and once unvoiced fricative. Response times (RTs) to the vowels were longer than to the fricatives. The error rate was higher for the consonants. Consonants in word-final position produced (he shortest RTs. For the...

Tube models are very popular for the computational modeling of speech production. For nasals and nasalized vowels a minimum of two tubes is necessary to accurately model the spectral components of the speech signal. Typically, such models are estimated applying a polezero model as a first step and then estimate the tubes cross-sectional areas based on this model. Here, we introduce a method tha...

Past studies have shown evidence of important speakerspecific content in the higher frequencies of the spectrum, which are filtered out by narrowband channels. Besides, wideband transmissions, which are gaining ground over narrowband communications, offer an extended range of frequencies which account not only for better speech quality and intelligibility, but also for an improved speaker recog...

The issues this paper addresses are the sonority conversion, which is defined as different ranking of sonority in a certain language, and the case taken from a variety of English. While Rhotic has larger sonority value than Lateral and Nasal in the general ranking, in Present-Day American English the tap, a rhotic, is less sonorous than the lateral and nasals but more sonorous than obstruents. ...

Inverse problems with respect to parameters of the articulatory model are solved for all types of sounds: vowels, semi-vowels, nasals, stops and fricatives in various contexts. Acoustical parameters of the speech signal and trajectories of some reference points inside the vocal tract serve as input data. 3.7%, 3.8% and 2.6% average approximation error for the first three formants, 8.5% for the ...

The accuracy with which native Japanese listeners identified American English vowels and coda nasals was assessed before and after training. The listeners were divided into four groups, each of which received a different type of training. Two of the four groups were vowel-oriented; one of these groups received vowel identification training (VI), while the other received vowel discrimination tra...

An acoustic-phonetic featureand knowledge-based system for the automatic segmentation, broad categorization and fine phoneme recognition of continuous speech is described. The system uses an auditory-based front-end processing and incorporates new knowledge-based algorithms to automatically segments the speech into phoneme-like segments that are further categorized into 4 main categories: sonor...

We consider how to detect phonetic features in noisy bandlimited speech. We propose an automatic method based on the hypothesis that independent feature detectors, working in parallel, account for the robustness of auditory strategies. Our method consists of three stages: rst, speech is ltered into critical bands and enhanced by nonlinearities; second, pho-netic cues are derived from narrowband...

Sweep frequency measurements of the transfer function of nasals and nasalized vowels have been found to show a more complex pole-zero pattern than can be predicted with a traditional model of the nasal tract which consists of two parallel tubes coupled to the oral cavities. In this paper, we put forward the hypothesis that the more complex transfer function can be explained with reference to th...

This paper presents a knowledge based approach to consonant recognition. In traditional knowledge based systems, the expert is the linguist/phonetician who attempts to describe and quantify the acoustic events, in the form of production rules into phonetic description. This paper proposes to alter the expert's role so that the expert only needs to provide the basic structure of the phonetic cla...