One problem with speech synthesis impeding high quality is the occurrence of audible discontinuities at segment boundaries. Formant jumps across concatenation points suggest the problem to be due to spectral differences. The problem is most apparent in vowels and semi-vowels. We propose to reduce the number of audible discontinuities by adding context-sensitive diphones to the database. The num...

There is increasing evidence that, in addition to velopharyngeal coupling, lingual position may also change during production of phonemic nasal vowels. In order to investigate differences in oral articulation between European Portuguese (EP) nasal vowels and oral counterparts, imaging data (both static and real-time MRI) of several EP speakers (male and female) are used. Superimposition of outl...

This paper investigates the average fundamental frequency of eight peripheral vowels in Belgian Standard Dutch in order to examine whether a vowel gradient exists with respect to Intrinsic Vowel Pitch (IF0). The results show that IF0 exists in Belgian Standard Dutch and amounts to 3.26 semi-tones. It is found that the assumed gradience in the degree of openness/tongue height is only reflected t...

The present paper proposes some hints to set up a number of prototypical vowels as acoustic-perceptual targets (APT). APTs are defined using theoretical considerations and the extensive use of an articulatory model for exploring the acoustic and perceptual space. This paper is a revisit of the notion of Cardinal Vowels, which were mainly described in articulatory terms. Our approach avoids the ...

The present paper proposes some hints to set up a number of prototypical vowels as acoustic-­‐perceptual targets (APT). APTs are defined using theoretical considerations and the extensive use of an articulatory model for exploring the acoustic and perceptual space. This paper...

introduction: on the importance of the formant frequency, it is enough to say that the first three formants of a vowel and their internal relationships are the major components in detection of vowel type by listener. moreover, the quality of a vowel depends on its factorial frequencies. the main application of measuring factorial frequency is for description of vowel errors because recognizing ...

in this paper, the validity of the key prediction of adaptive dispersion theory was tested. according to this prediction, vowels of a given language are organized in such a way that they are sufficiently distinct on the perceptual level. it implies that more crowded inventories, which also have wider f1 dimension, occupy greater vowel spaces than inventories with fewer vowels.  to investigate t...