As we talk, we unconsciously adjust our speech to ensure it sounds the way we intend it to sound. However, because speech production involves complex motor planning and execution, no two utterances of the same sound will be exactly the same. Here, we show that auditory cortex is sensitive to natural variations in self-produced speech from utterance to utterance. We recorded event-related potent...

Whispered speech holds cues to speech melody, in spite of the absence of F0. Shifts in the locations of formant peaks have been forwarded as a main cue. Whispering speakers, however, may convey high versus low boundary tones signalling questions versus statements without shifting their formants. Would the addition of formant shifts enhance these natural productions and improve question/statemen...

Coarticulation alters the vowel formant characteristics in continuous speech. Studies of isolated monosyilables in the Iiterature suggest that some phonemes cause more severe distortions than others. The largest changes are caused by /r /, /1/, /w /. Unstressed vowels are most affected. Previous studies by Holmes (6] and by us (13] indicate that these effects are even larger for continuous spee...

In recent years, several studies have shown the relationship between snoring and obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS). Instead of time domain analysis of snoring signal, the spectral features and shapes of snores have been found different in simple snorers and OSAS patients. In this study, we propose a method to differentiate simple snorers and OSAS patients based on spectral envelope estima...

The goal of the work described in this paper is to develop a very low bit rate vocoding scheme. The vocoder is a typical LPC vocoder, whose parameters are post-processed on a phone-byphone basis, resulting in a variable bit rate segment vocoder. Given the well known speaker recognizability problems presented by vocoders at such low bit rates, we have attempted to integrate a speaker modificatio...

In spite of the undisputedly high degree of non-stationarity of speech signals, the present day determination of its acoustic features is based on the assumption that speech production can be described as a linear time invariant (LTI) system on the time scale of about 20 ms [1]. In automatic speech recognition, the wide sense stationarity of an LTI– system is used as prerequisite for the consis...

PURPOSE This study reports data on vocal fundamental frequency (fo) and the first four formant frequencies (F1, F2, F3, F4) for four vowels produced by speakers in three adult age cohorts, in a test of the null hypothesis that there are no age-related changes in these variables. Participants were 43 men and 53 women between the ages of 20 and 92 years. RESULTS The most consistent age-related ...

Do vowel-contingent selective adaptation effects for place of articulation depend on vowel identity, or on the particular formant frequencies used? An experiment is reported here which tested the adaptation effects of consonants with exactly the same formant transitions before different diphthongs. In this experiment, the phonetic identity of the vowel and the formant frequencies of the consona...

The present paper investigates the recoverability of detailed spectral features such as formant and burst peak frequencies of prevocalic stop consonants in noise excited channel vocoded speech for bandwidths ranging from 250-2000 Hz. It is shown that some formant frequency information is still recoverable up to 1000 Hz. This challenges the claim that listeners must necessarily rely primarily on...