Minimal spectral contrast of formant peaks for vowel recognition as a function of spectral slope

Vowel recognition: Formants, Spectral Peaks,

Modest, reliable spectral peaks in preceding sounds influence vowel perception.

When a spectral property is reliable across an acoustic context and subsequent vowel target, perception deemphasizes this cue and shifts toward less predictable, more informative cues. This phenomenon (auditory perceptual calibration) has been demonstrated for reliable spectral peaks +20 dB or larger, but psychoacoustic findings predict sensitivity to more modest spectral peaks. Listeners ident...

Robust word recognition using threaded spectral peaks

A novel technique which characterizes the position and motion of dominant spectral peaks in speech, significantly reduces the errorrate of an HMM-based word-recognition system. The technique includes approximate auditory filtering, temporal adaptation, identification of local spectral peaks in each frame, grouping of neighboring peaks into threads, estimation of frequency derivatives, and slowl...

Effects of signal level and spectral contrast on vowel formant discrimination for normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners.

PURPOSE The aim of this study was to determine whether increasing the overall speech level or the individual spectral contrasts of vowel sounds can improve vowel formant discrimination for listeners both with and without normal hearing. METHOD Thresholds of vowel formant discrimination were examined for the F2 frequencies of 3 American English vowels for listeners with and without normal hear...

Formant position based weighted spectral features for emotion recognition

In this paper, we propose novel spectrally weighted mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (WMFCC) features for emotion recognition from speech. The idea is based on the fact that formant locations carry emotion-related information, and therefore critical spectral bands around formant locations can be emphasized during the calculation of MFCC features. The spectral weighting is derived from the nor...