This work explores the effect of mismatches between adults’ and children’s speech due to differences in various acoustic correlates on the automatic speech recognition performance under mismatched conditions. The different correlates studied in this work include the pitch, the speaking rate, the glottal parameters (open quotient, return quotient, and speech quotient), and the formant frequencie...

This article is a response to Hermann Künzel’s article ‘Beware of the “telephone effect”: the influence of telephone transmission on the measurement of formant frequencies’ (Forensic Linguistics 8(1), 80–99). There, he shows convincingly that the evaluation of formant frequencies, notably F1, is affected by the band-pass filter effect of telephone transmission. This response does not question h...

A technique for modifying vocal tract area functions is developed by using sum and difference combinations of acoustic sensitivity functions to perturb an initial vocal tract configuration. First, sensitivity functions [e.g., Fant and Pauli, Proc. Speech Comm. Sem. 74, 1975] are calculated for a given area function, at its specific formant frequencies. The sensitivity functions are then multipl...

An experiment has been performed where various two-formant models reported in the literature were assessed as to their ability to predict the formant frequencies obtained in a vowel identification task. An alternative model is proposed in which the auditory processing of vowel sounds is assumed to take place in two stages: a peripheral processing stage and a central processing stage. In the per...

Standard cochlea implant (CI) speech coding strategies transmit formant information only via the place of the stimulated electrode. In acoustic hearing, however, formant frequencies are additionally coded via the temporal rate of auditory nerve firing. This study presents a novel CI coding strategy (“Formant Locking (FL)-strategy”) that varies stimulation rates in relation to extracted fundamen...

In this paper we study changes of the articulatory organs from young adulthood to old age. In particular, we focus on how the larynx and vocal folds age along with the rest of the body. The objective of the paper is to automatically compute the effects of vocal aging on fundamental frequency and the formants. We compare trends of the fundamental, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd formant frequencies as the age...

This paper presents two techniques of formants estimation based on LPC and cepstral analysis. These methods are implemented with Matlab and applied to the problem of accurate measurement of formant frequencies. The first algorithm estimate formant frequencies from the all pole model of the vocal tract transfer function. The approach relies on the source – filter model supposing that the speech ...

The objective of this paper is to present a formant frequency estimation method, developed with a view to track small variations due to involuntary vocal tract movement. The formant frequency estimation is based on the instantaneous frequencies obtained by means of a complex wavelet transform and is synchronised with the glottal cycle. Results for synthetic speech signals show the precision of ...

The purpose of this study was to examine the acoustic characteristics of children's speech and voices that account for listeners' ability to identify gender. In Experiment I, vocal recordings and gross physical measurements of 4-, 8-, 12-, and 16-year olds were taken (10 girls and 10 boys per age group). The speech sample consisted of seven nondiphthongal vowels of American English (/ae/ "had,"...