The representation of speech goals was explored using an auditory feedback paradigm. When talkers produce vowels the formant structure of which is perturbed in real time, they compensate to preserve the intended goal. When vowel formants are shifted up or down in frequency, participants change the formant frequencies in the opposite direction to the feedback perturbation. In this experiment, th...

The majority of current speech enhancement systems are based on generalized signal-to-noise ratio dependent weighting rules and do not take into account the characteristics of the actual speech sound being processed. The following contribution is concerned with phoneme-specific speech enhancement methods that apply specially tailored signal processing methods. The first signal processing algori...

Changes in magnitude and variability of duration, fundamental frequency, formant frequencies, and spectral envelope of children’s speech are investigated as a function of age and gender using data obtained from 436 children, ages 5 to 17 years, and 56 adults. The results confirm that the reduction in magnitude and within-subject variability of both temporal and spectral acoustic parameters with...

While social and behavioural contexts are known to affect the acoustic structure of vocal signals in several mammal species, few studies have investigated context-related acoustic variation during inter-sexual advertisement and/or intra-sexual competition. Here we recorded male fallow deer groans during the breeding season and investigated how key acoustic parameters (fundamental frequency and ...

Speech is normally heard against a background of other sounds, yet our ability to isolate perceptually the speech of a particular talker is poorly understood. The experiments reported here illustrate two different ways in which a listener may decide whether a tone at a harmonic of a vowel's fundamental forms part of the vowel. First, a tone that starts or stops at a different time from a vowel ...

This paper proposes a formant-based approach for computer-assisted English vowel assessment. Various studies in formant-based speech synthesis have suggested the importance of formant coefficients; this motivates us to investigate pronunciation assessment using formant information instead of MFCC (Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients) alone. In particular, we explore the multistream HMM with the...

Single-formant dynamically changing harmonic vowel analogs, a target with a single frequency excursion and a longer distracter with a different fundamental frequency and repeated excursions were generated to assess informational and energetic masking of target transitions in young and elderly listeners. Results indicate the presence of informational masking that is significant only for formant ...

Noise-vocoded (NV) speech is often regarded as conveying phonetic information primarily through temporal-envelope cues rather than spectral cues. However, listeners may infer the formant frequencies in the vocal-tract output-a key source of phonetic detail-from across-band differences in amplitude when speech is processed through a small number of channels. The potential utility of this spectra...

The general literature on the phonetic correlates of stress agrees that duration, and in stress accent languages, F0 are consistent correlates of stress. However, the role of amplitude changes in the speech signal is more controversial. In particular, the conflicting results of spectral tilt as a correlate of stress have been attributed to the effects of vowel reduction. We examined the stress ...

We studied tongue positions of vowels in oral and nasal contexts. In the previous study [Arai, J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 115, p.2541 (2004)], formant frequencies were measured and bidirectional formant shifts in F1 frequency were observed: increasing F1 for high vowels and decreasing F1 for low vowels. Then, we tried to answer to the next question, that is, whether or not speakers and/or listeners c...