The aim of our study was to investigate whether children distinguish between ‘new’ and ‘given’ information via phonetic reduction in spontaneous speech in a similar way to adults. An interactive ‘spot the difference’ game was used to elicit spontaneous speech. Word duration, fundamental frequency and vowel formant frequencies in repeated content words relative to when they were mentioned for th...

Cochlear implants, like other types of auditory sensory aids, become increasingly ineffective with increasing ambient noise levels. One method of signal processing to reduce additive random wideband noise, the INTEL method, has been used to good effect as an input preprocessor for the Nucleus-22 cochlear implant. The implant's own signal processor estimates and encodes pitch frequency and the f...

Acoustic space is a useful tool which shows how the formant frequencies help objectively define the vowel space in a language. The present study revalidates the use of an empirically verifiable, quantifiable concept of acoustic space which also helps us revisit the DT Hypothesis and Quantal Theory. Through this study the authors show how relative positioning of vowels in vowel space is more imp...

Measuring formant frequencies in speech signals is indispensable for the search and technically problematic. Accurate measurement of formant frequencies is important in many studies of speech perception and production. Unfortunately, there is no totally effective method to allow good valuations of these frequencies. This paper presents a comparative study of two techniques of speech parameteriz...

This paper has reported on the comparative evaluation of gender recognition algorithms. The work that we described here is the two pitch detection algorithms and the related techniques including preprocessing, post-processing and extraction of pitch pattern. The gender based differences in human speech are partially due to physiological differences such as vocal fold thickness or vocal tract le...

This paper proposes a method of predicting the formant frequencies of a frame of speech from its mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) representation. Prediction is achieved through the creation of a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) which models the joint density of formant frequencies and MFCCs. Using this GMM and an input MFCC vector, a maximum a posteriori (MAP) prediction of the formant fre...

In our study we taught a female African Grey 11 Italian words: vowel-like sounds were extracted from comprehensible words after critical listening, and pitch frequency (Pkf) was measured for the first three formants of each vowel. Similarly, formants from human vowels were isolated and measured. The analysis run on formant frequencies mean values of both samples revealed that human vowels could...

BACKGROUND Auditory feedback reflects information on multiple speech parameters including fundamental frequency (pitch) and formant properties. Inducing auditory errors in these acoustic parameters during speech production has been used to examine the manner in which auditory feedback is integrated with ongoing speech motor processes. This integration has been shown to be impaired in disorders ...