The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of surgical rapid maxillary expansion (SRME) on vowel production. The subjects included 12 patients, whose speech were considered perceptually normal, that had undergone surgical RME for expansion of a narrow maxilla. They uttered the following Turkish vowels, ([a], [e], [dotless ...

In this study the acoustic and articulatory variabilities of speakers with different palate shapes were compared. Since the cross-sectional area of the vocal tract changes less for a slight change in tongue position if the palate is domeshaped than if it is flat, the acoustic variability should be greater for ...

This paper presents the design and evaluation of a new controller for a multi-finger tactual display in speech communication. A two-degree-of-freedom controller consisting of a feedback controller and a prefilter and its application in a consonant contrasting experiment are presented. The feedback controller provides stable, fast, and robust response of ...

Speakers can adopt a speaking style that allows them to be understood more easily in difficult communication situations, but few studies have examined the acoustic properties of clearly produced consonants in detail. This study attempts to characterize the adaptations in the clear production of American English fricatives in a carefully ...

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a wider instantaneous input dynamic range (IIDR) setting on speech perception and comfort in quiet and noise for children wearing the Nucleus 24 implant system and the Freedom speech processor. In addition, children's ability to understand soft and ...

European vowels are mainly distinguished by the two lowest resonance frequencies (R1 and R2) of the vocal tract. Once the pitch frequency f(0) exceeds the value of R1 in normal speech, sopranos can deliberately "tune" R1 to match f(0). This increases loudness, uniformity of tone, and ease of singing, at ...

Affective states are thought to be expressed in the mammalian voice, but such investigations are most common in primates. Source and filter features of rumbles were analyzed from 6 adult female African elephants (Loxodonta africana) at Disney's Animal Kingdom. Rumbles produced during periods of minimal social interaction ("low affect") were ...

BACKGROUND: effectiveness of the sonorous tongue vibration technique (STVT). AIM: to investigate the sensations and the vocal and laryngeal impact produced by the sonorous tongue vibration technique. METHOD: The STVT was performed in three sets of fifteen repetitions, in maximum phonatory duration using a normal tone and intensity - with ...

Lingual movement data for Catalan vowel-consonant-vowel sequences reveal differences in contextual coarticulatory variability in tongue position at the middle of the consonant for p>/n/>dark/l/>/s/>> and at vowel midpoint for /u/>/a/>/i/. The velar stop /k/ exhibits a high degree of contextual variability in the horizontal dimension but not in the vertical ...

It has been suggested that Mandarin, as a tone language, uses a larger F0 range than English. This study addresses two questions: (1) Do English and Mandarin F0 profiles differ? (2) How does the type of voice sample which is measured affect this F0 characterization and language comparison? Native speakers ...

As the position of a vowel changes within the vowel space across generations of speakers, so does its dynamic formant pattern. This study examines variation in the dynamic patterns of vowel formants across two age groups: children (8-12 years) and older adults from their grandparents' generation (51-65 years). The cross-generational ...

The sound generated in the avian vocal organ, the syrinx, is modified by the filter properties of the upper vocal tract before it radiates from the beak as song. Previous investigators have shown that the properties of this vocal tract filter are affected by changes in beak gape, but the ...

Korean lacks place contrast of coronal fricatives before i. Yet three alveopalatal fricatives, fortis, lenis, and labialized, occur in this context. Fortis and lenis alveopalatals are intermediate between English alveolar and postalveolar in spectral peak location, though fortis has peak at higher frequencies, and thus is closer to English s. ...

Identification accuracy for synthetic vowel stimuli generated with static vocal tract area functions from eight speakers was recently reported (K. Bunton and B. H. Story, JASA, in press). Although vowels were identified with reasonably high accuracy, in many cases neighboring vowels were confused. In the present study, new stimuli were ...

Forensic phoneticians have long utilized conventional spectrograms as the basis of the the auditory-acoustic method of speaker identification. Recent investigations [S. A. Fulop and K. Fitz, "Using the reassigned spectrogram to obtain a voiceprint," J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 119, 3337 (2006); S. A. Fulop and S. Disner, "The reassigned spectrogram ...

Diphthongs are acoustically characterized by formant movements between initial and final vocalic segments [cf, Holbook and Fairbanks, J. Speech Hear. Res., (1962); Thomas Gay, J. Acoust. Soc. Am., (1968)]. It has been observed that the initial (onset) and final (offset) portions may not correspond to typical monophthongal vowels and that ...

Cochlear implant listeners are able to at least partially adapt to the spectral mismatch associated with the implant device and speech processor via daily exposure and/or explicit training. The overall goal of this study was to investigate interactions between short-term unsupervised learning (i.e., passive adaptation) and the degree of spectral ...

In isolated syllables cross-formant perceptual grouping can be promoted by a common fundamental frequency (F0), but this effect is relatively weak [Darwin, Q., J. Exp. Psychol. 33A, 185-207 (1981)]. Few studies have explored the role of F0 in cross-formant grouping using sentences. Three-formant (F1+F2+F3) analog of almost continuously voiced natural ...

In pursuit of an ultimately realistic human-to-human telecommunication technology, the ability to auditorily perceive the facing direction of a human speaker was measured. A male speaker sat on a pivot chair in an anechoic chamber and spoke a short sentence (about 5 s) while facing either of eight azimuth angles ...

Individual consonants vary in intelligibility when speech is presented in constant-intensity speech-spectrum noise. This variation in consonant intelligibility is explained at various levels, ranging from bottom-up energetic masking of different-intensity auditory cues needed to identify different consonants, to the top-down use of context information. This study focuses on bottom-up auditory ...

The present study investigates prosodic variation, as realized by L1 German speakers of varying pronunciation aptitude (below-average, average, and above-average) in comparison with native speakers of English. The results demonstrate the frequency of distribution of various pitch contours in read and spontaneous speech samples, English and German, on both the ...

Several studies on the pronunciation of English vowels point out that Korean learners have difficulty producing English tense and lax vowel pairs. The acoustic comparisons of those studies are mostly based on the formant measurement at one time point of a given vowel section. However, the English lax vowels usually ...

Despite wide diversity among particular vowel sounds used across the world's languages, there are profound systematicities across languages. Whether sets of three, five, seven, or more vowel sounds are used, vowels that comprise these sets have substantial commonality across languages. Using static measures of vowel spectra, Lindblom and colleagues have ...

French high back rounded u is characterized by a concentration of energy in the low frequency zone (< 1000 Hz) due to the grouping of the first two formants, and midhigh front rounded o by a balanced distribution of formants, with F2 located around 1500 Hz. Japanese-speaking learners of French ...

Speech comprises dynamic and heterogeneous acoustic elements yet is heard as a single perceptual stream, even when accompanied by other sounds. The relative contributions of grouping primitives and of speech-specific factors, for example modulation patterns, to the perceptual coherence of speech are unclear, and the critical acoustical correlates of the ...

During vocalization, auditory feedback is used to attain and maintain a desired fundamental frequency (F0). The use of auditory feedback to control vocalization has been studied using adaptation studies, in which an F0 feedback alteration is maintained across many trials, and using midutterance perturbations, where a brief F0 change is ...

Formant trajectories are excellent vowel discriminants; within vowel, they are nearly constant across speaker size, age, and sex, and across consonantal contexts. However, this model assumes that formant peaks are perceptually important and that human listeners track formant-frequency changes across time. Speech-recognition applications have avoided formant frequencies due to the ...

The high back rounded u of Parisian French (PF) is characterized by a concentration of energy in the low frequency zone (< 1000 Hz) due to the grouping of the first two formants, while Quebec French (QF) has a "lax" variant [U] in closed syllables (as in "soupe"), with its ...

Studies on the articulatory correlates of syllable structure have shown that onset and coda consonants differ systematically in the timing and amplitude of their movements, and their temporal coordination with the vocalic syllable nucleus. Little is known, however, about consonants functioning as syllable nuclei. We present EMA data on Slovak, ...

Mongolian gerbils, Meriones unguiculatus, have been used for auditory physiological studies. However, few studies have investigated precise relationships between a specific vocalization and a specific behavior. The purpose of this study was to examine the process to produce a specific vocalization: Greeting call. Their vocalizations and behaviors were separately recorded ...

Voice quality contour measurements were used to detect prosody markers. This work is an extension of an earlier paper that examined static voice quality measures for prosody detection. Voice quality measures include those related to the voice source, such as open quotient, spectral tilt, and harmonic component distributions. Specifically, the ...

A growing body of work indicates that subglottal resonances (SGRs) divide the frequency space of vowels and consonants into distinct regions in several languages [S. Lulich, J. Phonetics (in press), and references therein]. For instance, the second formant frequency (F2) of back vowels lies between the first and second subglottal ...

OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS: Little is known regarding the phonatory consequences of unilateral external superior laryngeal nerve (ESLN) paralysis. By selectively blocking the ESLN with lidocaine HCl (with laryngeal electromyography verification), we modeled acute, unilateral cricothyroid (CT) muscle dysfunction to explore possible acoustic, aerodynamic, auditory-perceptual and auto-perceptive effects. STUDY DESIGN: Prospective, repeated measures, ...

Electroglottographic (EGG) jitter and shimmer have been described as more sensitive than acoustic perturbation. Recent studies documented significant voice intensity effects on acoustic parameters even in "normal" voice intensity. The aim of this cross-sectional single cohort study was to compare voice intensity effects in acoustic and electroglottographic measurements in several ...

Previous work [JSLHR, 47, 1259-1269 (2004)] demonstrated that speakers of American English who consistently activated a contact sensor on the lower alveolar ridge with the tongue tip during s but not sh tended to produce greater sibilant contrast than speakers who did not consistently show this contact difference. This result ...

The paper presents the spectral characteristics of the dorsal and apical vowels in open syllables of the Peking dialect. Results show that (i) of the dorsal category the high and low vowels are monophthongs, whereas the mid-back vowels and rhotacized are diphthongal; (ii) the two apical vowels are similar in ...

The effects of intrinsic and extrinsic distortions on vowel perception were evaluated. Potential sources of distortion were high presentation level, background noise, stimulus ambiguity, and hearing status. Vowel identifications were collected for three sets of synthesized vowels that varied in both F1 and F2 (front and back vowels), or F2 ...

Assmann and Nearey [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 80, 1297-1308 (1986)] coined the term "vowel-inherent spectral change" (VISC) to refer to change in spectral properties inherent to the phonetic specification of vowels. Although VISC includes the relatively large formant movements associated with acknowledged diphthongs, it was explicitly extended to include reliable ...

This presentation explores two approaches to characterizing changes to speech with amplitude-compression amplification. In the first, we considered changes to waveform morphology using the envelope difference index (EDI); [Fortune et al. (1994)] to quantify the effects on amplitude envelope in the time domain. In the second, the spectral correlation index ...

Vowels are typically described according to three articulatory dimensions: height, frontness, and rounding. Other researchers propose a role for the jaw in the height dimension. In the present study, we measured the relative contribution of the tongue and jaw for vocalic height distinction in American English vowels. Tongue and jaw ...

Subtypes of dysarthria are often described in terms of particular disruptions in speech rhythms. In an attempt to quantify these differences, the envelope modulation spectrum (EMS) was computed on sentences read by speakers with hypokinetic, hyperkinetic, ataxic, and mixed flaccid-spastic dysarthria, and a group of normal speakers (43 speakers total). ...

Consonant identification experiments are typically based on stimuli produced with a formant synthesizer where a particular acoustic characteristic is varied along some continuum of values (e.g., onset frequency of F2). In this experiment, however, vowel-consonant-vowel (VCV) stimuli were generated with a synthesizer based on a kinematic model of the vocal ...

In comprehending speech, listeners are sensitive to the acoustic variation encoding the prosodic structures that mark phrasing and prominence. The present study, based on prosody transcriptions of untrained listeners (74 monolingual American English speakers), tests which acoustic feature or feature combinations cue prosodic prominence, and specifically, whether ordinary listeners perceive ...

Psychometric functions of vowel detection and vowel identification were measured in long-term speech-shaped noise (LTSSN) for normal-hearing listeners. A four-interval forced-choice procedure was used to examine the accuracy of vowel detection in LTSSN with speech level presented from -10 to +5 dB sensational level relative to vowel detection thresholds obtained ...

The effect of stimulus timing on vocal responses to pitch-shifted feedback was investigated in different intonation patterns during Mandarin speech production. While speaking a four-word sentence consisting of the high-level tone, where the fundamental frequency (F(0)) of the final word was either increased (question intonation) or slightly falling (statement intonation), ...

Humpback whale vocalizations were recorded using hydrophones on glider systems off Alaska in January 2000, in Hawaii in February 2008, and in the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary in October 2007 and July 2008. The vocalizations have been grouped into five call types based on the most prominent signal features. ...

The addition of low-frequency acoustic information to real or simulated electric stimulation (so-called electric-acoustic stimulation or EAS) often results in large improvements in intelligibility, particularly in competing backgrounds. This may reflect the availability of fundamental frequency (F0) information in the acoustic region. The contributions of F0 and the amplitude envelope ...

This paper examines vowel-to-vowel lingual coarticulation in sequences of vowel-bilabial consonant-vowel, where the duration of the oral closure for the consonant is either long or short. Native speakers of Japanese served as subjects. The linguistic material consisted of Japanese word pairs that only differed in the duration of the labial ...

We performed an analysis of the vocalization of 161 ewes and 50 male lambs that were pastured day and night. The vocalization structures of the phonetic notations of the opened-mouth from closed mouth /etaaee/ and /etanaeee/ and closed-mouth /etaetaetaeta/ of ewes, and the opened-mouth from closed-mouth /etaeee/ and /etaneeee/ and ...

Lexical tone identification relies primarily on the processing of F0. Since F0 range differs across individuals, the interpretation of F0 usually requires reference to specific speakers. This study examined whether multispeaker Mandarin tone stimuli could be identified without cues commonly considered necessary for speaker normalization. The sa syllables, produced by ...