While vocal tract resonances or formants are key acoustic parameters that define differences between phonemes in human speech, little is known about their function in animal communication. Here, we used playback experiments to present red deer stags with re-synthesized vocalizations in which formant frequencies were systematically altered to simulate callers of different body sizes. In response...

Perceptual and acoustic spaces obtained using MDS and PCA, respectively, for a set of Spanish vowels uttered in various fricative contexts are compared. Acoustic cues to vowel quality were studied through examination of the weights given by PCA to specific spectral regions. The acoustic space formed by the first two formant frequencies was also evaluated. The results show that MDS has serious d...

The perceptual grouping of a four-tone cycle was studied as a function of differences in fundamental frequencies and the frequencies of spectral peaks. Each tone had a single formant and at least 13 harmonics. In Experiment 1 the formant was created by filtering a flat spectrum and in Experiment 2 by adding harmonics. Fundamental frequency was found to be capable of controlling grouping even wh...

PURPOSE Differences in vocal tract morphology have the potential to explain interspeaker variability in speech production. The potential acoustic impact of hard palate shape was examined in simulation, in addition to the interplay among morphology, articulation, and acoustics in real vowel production data. METHOD High-front vowel production from 5 speakers of American English was examined usi...

The paper proposes an analysis to estimate formant differences and/or pitch by relying on patterns of modulation observed in fibers influenced by a summation of close harmonics. It is shown that such modulation information seems to be robust to noise.

A method has been developed for three-dimensional reconstruction of the vocal tract shape and for the calculation of area function from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). MR images were acquired and analyzed for 6 German long vowels uttered by one subject. The resulting vocal tract area functions are the basis for the calculation of formant frequencies. Conformity with acoustically measured form...

Although laughter is an important aspect of nonverbal vocalization, its acoustic properties are still not fully understood. Extreme articulation during laughter production, such as wide jaw opening, suggests that laughter can have very high first formant (F(1)) frequencies. We measured fundamental frequency and formant frequencies of the vowels produced in the vocalic segments of laughter. Voca...

We present a method for estimating the vocal-tract area function from specified formant frequencies. The method extends the work of Story (J.A.S.A., 119, 715-718, 1996) based on a sensitivity function representing the change in the formant frequency due to a small perturbation of the cross-sectional area of the vocal tract. Our method estimates the vocal-tract shape through an iterative procedu...