Two experiments investigated the effects of small values of fundamental frequency difference (delta F0) on the identification of concurrent vowels. As delta F0's get smaller, mechanisms that exploit them must necessarily fail, and the pattern of breakdown may tell which mechanisms are used by the auditory system. Small delta F0's also present a methodological difficulty. If the stimulus is shor...

This paper presents an aerodynamic analysis of intonation on reading speech in Hong Kong Cantonese. In this study, the variation in oral airflow rate, fundamental frequency (F0), as well as intensity level of the acoustic signal is studied. The goals of this study are to evaluate the correlations among fundamental frequency of vibration of the vocal folds, rate of oral airflow and intensity lev...

Biphonation, i.e. two independent fundamental frequencies in a call spectrum, is a prominent feature of vocal activity in dog-like canids. Dog-like canids can produce a low (f0) and a high (g0) fundamental frequency simultaneously. In contrast, fox-like canids are only capable of producing the low fundamental frequency (f0). Using a comparative anatomical approach for revealing macroscopic stru...

Recent experimental findings suggest stable individual differences in the perception of auditory stimuli lacking energy at the fundamental frequency (F0), here called missing fundamental (MF) tones. Specifically, some individuals readily identify the pitch of such tones with the missing F0 ("F0 listeners"), and some base their judgment on the frequency of the partials that make up the tones ("s...

This acoustic study explored dialect effects on realization of nuclear pitch accents in three regional varieties of American English spoken in central Ohio, southeastern Wisconsin and western North Carolina. Fundamental frequency (f0) change from vowel onset to offset in the most prominent syllable in a sentence was examined along four parameters: maximum f0 change, relative location of f0 maxi...

In parametric text-to-speech synthesis using Hidden Markov Model (HMM), the fundamental frequency (F0) parameter modelling is important because it has a direct effect on the prosody of synthetic speech. F0 is typically modelled by a discrete distribution for unvoiced speech and a continuous distribution for voiced, by using a multi-space distribution (MSD). However, F0 modelling using MSD-HMM i...

Speech intelligibility in multitalker settings is challenging for most cochlear implant (CI) users. One possibility this limitation the suboptimal representation of vocal cues processing, such as fundamental frequency (F0), and tract length (VTL). Previous studies suggested that while F0 perception depends on spectrotemporal cues, VTL relies largely spectral cues. To investigate how smearing CI...

This study examines the phonetic properties of lexical stress in English produced by Persian speakers learning English as a foreign language. The four most reliable phonetic correlates of English lexical stress, namely fundamental frequency, duration, intensity, and vowel quality were measured across Persian speakers’ production of the stressed and unstressed syllables of five English disyllabi...

In our previous work, we proposed a speaking-aid system converting electrolaryngeal speech (EL speech) to normal speech using a statistical voice conversion technique. The main weakness of our system is the difficulty of estimating natural contours of the fundamental frequency (F0) from EL speech including only built-in F0 contours. This paper proposes another speaking-aid system with an air-pr...