A simple and fast voice conversion method based only on vowel information is proposed. The proposed method relies on empirical distribution of perceptual spectral distances between representative examples of each vowel segment extracted using TANDEM-STRAIGHT spectral envelope estimation procedure [1]. Mapping functions of vowel spectra are designed to preserve vowel space structure defined by t...

Lexical frequency and phonological neighbourhood density have been found to influence vowel production. This experiment investigated the effect of lexical frequency and phonological neighbourhood density on vowel space expansion in words and nonwords. Twenty speakers produced words varying in phonological neighbourhood density and word frequency and produced nonwords that varied in neighbourhoo...

The aim of this paper is to study the effect of the number of vowels a language has on the size of its vocalic space, in the production of speech from two Arabic dialects, Moroccan and Jordanian Arabic, and from French. 5 speakers per language (or dialect) recorded a list of vowels in 3 conditions: vowels were embedded in 1) Words, 2) Syllables, and 3) produced in Isolation. For each condition,...

An approach is presented in this paper for vowel classification by analyzing the dynamics of speech production in a reconstructed phase space. The proposed approach has the ability of capturing nonlinearities that may exist in speech production. Global flow reconstruction is used to generate a quantitative description of the structure and trajectory of vowel attractors in a reconstructed phase ...

We investigated the influence of prosodic structure and information density on vowel space size. Vowels were measured in five languages from the BonnTempo corpus, French, German, Finnish, Czech, and Polish, each with three female and three male speakers. Speakers read the text at normal, slow, and fast speech rate. The Euclidean distance between vowel space midpoint and formant values for each ...

The phonemic inventory of Tsuut’ina, an Athabaskan language, has a distinct and diverse catalogue of consonants with well-defined features and articulations. The language also contains a phonemic tonal and vowel length system. However, much has been questioned about the vowel space of the language. A traditional analysis of the language’s vowel inventory (a la Cook 1971 & 1984, and Li 1930) is ...

Differences in pronunciation have been shown to underlie significant talker-dependent intelligibility differences. There are several dimensions of variability that are correlated with talker intelligibility including pitch range, vowel-space expansion, and rhythmic patterns. Prior work has shown that some of the better predictors of individual intelligibility are based on the talker’s F1 by F2 ...

BACKGROUND/AIMS This study examined the spectral characteristics of American English vowels in dysarthria associated with cerebral palsy (CP), and investigated the relationship between a speaker's overall speech intelligibility and vowel contrast. METHODS The data were collected from 12 American English native speakers (9 speakers with a diagnosis of CP and 3 controls). Primary measures were ...

PURPOSE To quantify the articulatory distinctiveness of 8 major English vowels and 11 English consonants based on tongue and lip movement time series data using a data-driven approach. METHOD Tongue and lip movements of 8 vowels and 11 consonants from 10 healthy talkers were collected. First, classification accuracies were obtained using 2 complementary approaches: (a) Procrustes analysis and...