Duration measurements of long and short high vowels in the Limburgish dialect of Maastricht show that these vowels have a relatively contextfree durational difference compared to the durational difference found between members of tonal minimal pairs in the dialect. The latter have a substantial duration difference in intonation-phrase final position, but a much reduced difference in phrase-inte...

The blood pressure in both arms of 103 unselected hemiplegic patients was measured using a random-zero sphygmomanometer. Although for the whole sample the mean blood pressure in the paretic and unaffected arm was similar, a significant difference was found when the patients were subdivided according to the tone of the arm. The blood pressure was higher in paretic arms of patients with a spastic...

This study presents a new way of observing the categorical nature of Mandarin tone perception by considering the phonation factors in the experiment design. In order to demonstrate the reliability of experiment materials, a pitch synchronous overlap-add (PSOLA) method is used to produce the speech stimuli, and an inversefiltering method is applied to assess the invariability of sound source of ...

Based on the acoustic experimental data from 30 subjects, we reported sociophonetic variation in the citation tones in Chongqing Mandarin in this paper. The comprehensive analysis of both the pitch and duration illustrated the difference in the citation tones. Our results showed that pitch is greatly impacted by age but not by gender. The tone curve is located on the top of the tone register in...

This paper aims to investigate the effect of speech act and tone on rhythm. Participants were asked to produce four sets of words in five speech acts. PVI values of duration, pitch, and intensity were used to test the rhythm of vowels. Two main findings were concluded. First, speech act did not have any effect on rhythm, which may be caused by the fact that speech act were not performed on the ...

While laboratory methods for estimating genetic susceptibility for adult psychopathology have received much recent attention, laboratory methods for objectively estimating a person's early autonomic nervous system perturbations have been under-researched. Research on heart rate variability suggests that early life episodes of diminished vagal tone may predict poor stress resilience in adults. T...

Recent studies have shown that temporal waveform envelope cues can provide significant information for English speech recognition. This study investigated the use of temporal envelope cues in a tonal language: Mandarin Chinese. In this study, the speech was divided into several frequency analysis bands; the amplitude envelope was extracted from each band by half-wave rectification and low-pass ...

The amount of tissue perfused, as determined from the difference in volume of distribution between a diffusible indicator (125I-antipyrine) and an intravascular indicator (131 I-albumin) was measured at different values of coronary flow, perfusion pressure, and vasomotor tone in the working left ventricle of an open-chest dog. Coronary pressure and flow were regulated independently from the sys...

Psychophysical experiments show that the pitch of a short sine wave tone depends upon the amplitude envelope of the tone. Subjects find that the pitch of an exponentially decaying tone (1dB/ms) is higher than the pitch of a (20-ms) rectangularly gated tone of equal frequency. The percentage difference in frequency required to produce equal pitches with the two envelopes depends upon frequency f...

In this paper, an improved dynamic programming (IDP) algorithm based on wild card mechanism and continuity constraint for the formant tracking is proposed, and the ratios of Chinese whispered to voiced formants are statistically analyzed. Experiments were performed on six Chinese simple blade vowels with four tones uttered by 20 speakers. The formant differences are quantified by the ratios of ...