Given the importance of voice quality in signalling personal identity and social group membership, effective control of voice features may become especially important during adolescence, yet this has to be achieved in the context of significant physical changes within the speech production system. Most previous research has focussed on phonation, but this study used Vocal Profile Analysis (VPA)...

This paper describes the analysis of the voice-quality features of “anger”, “joy”, and “sadness” depending on the degree of the emotion for expressions in Japanese speech. The degrees of emotion were “neutral”, “light”, “medium” and “strong”. Among voice-quality features, we turned to the noise level of the glottal-flow waveform. We adopted the AR model and measured the noise levels of the pred...

Previous studies have shown changes in women's behavior and physical appearance between the non-fertile and fertile phases of the menstrual cycle. It is assumed that these changes are regulated by fluctuations in sex hormone levels across the cycle. Receptors for sex hormones have been found on the vocal folds, suggesting a link between hormone levels and vocal fold function, which might cause ...

One of the most intriguing aspects of phonetic science is the number of distinguishable layers within the speech signal. Within even a single segment, such as a vowel, speakers control vowel quality, duration, F0, speech style, and so forth. Listeners, in turn, have learned to pay attention to these different acoustic layers in order to extract meaningful information from the speech signal. Pho...

The aim of this study was to analyze the voice quality of alaryngeal tracheoesophageal and esophageal speech, and to determine which of them is more similar to laryngeal voice production, and thus more acceptable as a rehabilitation method of laryngectomized persons. Objective voice evaluation was performed on a sample of 20 totally laryngectomized subjects of both sexes, average age 61.3 years...

Morén, S. 2018. Unilateral Cleft Lip and Palate. Speech, Voice and Nasal Function in Adults. Digital Comprehensive Summaries of Uppsala Dissertations from the Faculty of Medicine 1423. 89 pp. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. ISBN 978-91-513-0224-9. Cleft lip and palate (CLP) is the most common craniofacial malformation. Even after repair of the cleft there may be persistent symptoms aff...

“Rikimi” is a “pressed-type” voice quality that appears in Japanese conversational speech for expressing paralinguistic information related to emotional or attitudinal behaviors of the speaker. We conducted acoustic, electroglottographic (EGG) and paralinguistic analyses on speech segments including “rikimi”, extracted from spontaneous dialogue speech data. “Rikimi” may be accompanied by severa...

Seeing that speakers increase the intensity of their voice when speaking in loud noise (Lombard effect), this paper proposes a speech transformation approach to mimic this Lombard effect for improving the intelligibility of speech in noisy environments. The approach attempts to simulate the variations of duration, formant frequencies, formant bandwidth, fundamental frequency (F0), and energy in...