In this study, we determine the acoustic correlates of primary and secondary stress in Tongan. Vowels with primary stress show differences in F0, intensity, duration, F1, and voice quality, but F0 is the best predictor of primary stress. Vowels with secondary stress are mainly cued by a difference in F0. With regards to the effects of stress on the vowel space, we find that all five Tongan vowe...

In this study, we expand the question of ”what is the intrinsic dimensionality of speech?” to ”how does the intrinsic dimensionality of speech change from speaking to singing?”. Our focus is on dimensionality of the vowel space regarding spectral features, which is important in acoustic modeling applications. Locality Preserving Projection (LPP) is applied for dimensionality reduction of the sp...

Differences in vowel formants in bass and tenor singers, as well as the perception of vowels synthesised at different fundamental frequencies predict that in a group of male or female speakers exhibiting a sufficiently wide range of average fundamental frequencies, there will be a positive correlation between the speakers’ average f0 and the dimensions of their acoustic vowel spaces. This hypot...

In much experimental phonetics the concept of a vowel space is discussed. The density of points within this vowel space can be modelled using a mixture gaussian density function. There are a number of advantages in modelling the vowel space in this way. The model can generalise, producing a smooth representation of sometimes noisy data. The model can be used to normalise vowel spaces produced b...

In contrast with previous research focusing on cochlear implants, this study examined the speech performance of hearing aid users with conductive (n = 11), mixed (n = 10), and sensorineural hearing loss (n = 7) and compared it with the speech of hearing control. Speech intelligibility was evaluated by computing the vowel space area defined by the Mandarin Chinese corner vowels /a, u, i/. The ac...

In this paper, we tried to develop a vowel training assistant method using vowel formant statistics. Formant statistics were obtained from PBW set consists of 452 words from 8 persons. Then, we calculated distance from input formants to each center of vowel formant space. Based on the distance, directions to correct the speaker's manner of articulations, i.e. position of jaw and tongue.

Vowel quality perception in quantity languages is considered to be unrelated to vowel duration since duration is used to realize quantity oppositions. To test the role of microdurational variations in vowel category perception in Estonian listening experiments with synthetic stimuli were carried out, involving five vowel pairs along the close-open axis. The results show that in the case of high...

The present study examined the effect of stress on vowels, specifically duration, formant frequency and acoustic vowel space in CV syllable in Daxi Hakka Chinese. F1 and F2 values were measured at three equidistant time locations. Results show that the absence of stress results in the reduction of vowel duration, which is shortened by 23% in the unstressed condition. The presence of stress affe...

This study investigated whether individuals with small and large native-language (L1) vowel inventories learn second-language (L2) vowel systems differently, in order to better understand how L1 categories interfere with new vowel learning. Listener groups whose L1 was Spanish (5 vowels) or German (18 vowels) were given five sessions of high-variability auditory training for English vowels, aft...

Vowel space area (VSA) is an attractive metric for the study of speech production deficits and reductions in intelligibility, in addition to the traditional study of vowel distinctiveness. Traditional VSA estimates are not currently sufficiently sensitive to map to production deficits. The present report describes an automated algorithm using healthy, connected speech rather than single syllabl...