Nasality in modal speech and twang qualities: Physiologic, acoustic, and perceptual differences

An Acoustic and Perceptual Study of Vowel Nasality in Taiwanese

The contrast between nasal vowels and oral vowels is phonemic in Taiwanese, however, their distributions are not entirely contrastive. For example, nasal nuclei do not occur when the coda is a nasal. It is analyzed that historically the nasal feature of the nasal coda spreads leftward to the nucleus, when the vocalic nasalization is rephonologized, the nasal coda is lost. Therefore, it has been...

Babble speech: acoustic and perceptual variability

The presence of babble noise is one of the most difficult environments to sustain speech system performance. This study focuses on acoustic and perceptual analyses of babble. The acoustic variability of babble is analyzed as a function of the number of speakers in babble. The concept of acoustic volume is proposed and it is shown that the acoustic volume reduces as the number of speakers in bab...

Perceptual Differences in Natural Speech and Personalized Synthetic Speech

Perceptual asymmetry between greater and lesser vowel nasality and VOT

This study explores whether there is an asymmetry with respect to the perceptual salience of an increase vs. a decrease of phonologically relevant features. A forced-choice discrimination experiment was conducted on stimulus pairs that included one member with unchanged phonetic features and the other with either increased or decreased degree of features (i.e., vowel nasality or VOT). The resul...

Perceptual qualities and material classes.

Under typical viewing conditions, we can easily group materials into distinct classes (e.g., woods, plastics, textiles). Additionally, we can also make many other judgments about material properties (e.g., hardness, rigidity, colorfulness). Although these two types of judgment (classification and inferring material properties) have different requirements, they likely facilitate one another. We ...