BACKGROUND Models of honest advertisement predict that sexually selected calls should signal male quality. In most vertebrates, high quality males have larger body sizes that determine higher social status and in turn higher reproductive success. Previous research has emphasised the importance of vocal tract resonances or formant frequencies of calls as cues to body size in mammals. However, th...

This work proposes a novel method of predicting formant frequencies from a stream of mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) feature vectors. Prediction is based on modelling the joint density of MFCC vectors and formant vectors using a Gaussian mixture model (GMM). Using this GMM and an input MFCC vector, two maximum a posteriori (MAP) prediction methods are developed. The first method pred...

PURPOSE This article integrates published acoustic data on the development of vowel production. Age specific data on formant frequencies are considered in the light of information on the development of the vocal tract (VT) to create an anatomic-acoustic description of the maturation of the vowel acoustic space for English. METHOD Literature searches identified 14 studies reporting data on vow...

The amplitude of the mismatch negativity response for acoustic within-category deviations in speech stimuli was investigated by presenting participants with different exemplars of the vowel /i/ in an odd-ball paradigm. The deviants differed from the standard either in terms of fundamental frequency, the first formant, or the second formant. Changes in fundamental frequency are generally more sa...

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...

The two experiments described here use a formant-matching task to investigate what abstract representations of sound are available to listeners. The first experiment examines how veridically and reliably listeners can adjust the formant frequency of a single-formant sound to match the timbre of a target single-formant sound that has a different bandwidth and either the same or a different funda...

This study presents a method for estimation of glottal formant frequency (Fg) from speech signals. Our method is based on zeros of z-transform decomposition of speech spectra into two spectra : glottal flow dominated spectrum and vocal tract dominated spectrum. Peak picking is performed on the amplitude spectrum of the glottal flow dominated part. The algorithm is tested on synthetic speech. It...

The acoustic wave propagation inside the vocal tract was simulated assuming plane waves. When an acoustic tube having appropriate area function but no side branching cavities was used as the nasal tract, the low frequency nasal formant below the first formant of low vowels as observed in natural speech could not be simulated. The relatively short nasal tract with both ends open cannot produce t...

In this paper we present a new formant tracking algorithm where the formant frequencies estimation was based on local maxima detection of a time frequency representation. This representation can be shown by a scalogram issued from a complex wavelet transform. The formant frequency candidates are validated as local maxima of scalogram which correspond to wavelet ridges. Then in the proposed algo...