We investigate the relationship between vowel quantity and the utilization of formant space in Slovak, and how prosodic variation in speech rate and lexical stress marking affects this relationship. Slovak presents a common five-vowel system with full phonemic quantity contrast for all vowels in all positions. We found that 1) phonemic quantity contrast in Slovak is salient and minimally affect...

Among the key acoustic features attributed with the intelligibility gain of Clear speech are the observed reduction in speaking rate and expansion of vowel space, representing greater articulation and vowel discrimination. Considering the slower speaking rate, previous works have attempted to assess the intelligibility impact of time-scaling casual speech to mimic Clear speech. In a complementa...

We introduce a set of speaker dependent features derived from the positions of vowels in Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) space relative to a reference vowel. The MFCCs for a particular speaker are transformed using simple operations into features that can be used to classify vowels from a common reference point. Classification performance of vowels using Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs)...

This paper aims at following the concept of vowel space across history. It shows that even with very poor experimental means, researchers from the 17 th century started to organize the vowel systems along perceptual dimensions, either articulatory, by means of proprioceptive introspection, or auditory. With the development of experimental devices, and the increasing knowledge in acoustic and ar...

Hypernasality (HP) is observed across voiced phonemes uttered by Cleft-Palate (CP) speakers with defective velopharyngeal (VP) opening. HP assessment using signal processing technique is challenging due to the variability of acoustic features across various conditions such as speakers, speaking style, speaking rate, severity of HP etc. Most of the study for hypernasality (HP) assessment is base...

This study examined spectral properties of the Hungarian vowel pair /i/ vs. /i:/ with contrasting phonemic vowel lengths in 2;0 and 4;0 years old boys acquiring Hungarian as their native language. Results were obtained by an automated pitchsynchronous bandfilter analysis method that estimates the spectral envelope representation of vowels. Subsequent data reduction was achieved via principal co...