Vowel identification: Are formants really necessary?

Vowel constrictions are recoverable from formants

The area function of the vocal tract in all of its spatial detail is not directly computable from the speech signal. But is partial, yet phonetically distinctive, information about articulation recoverable from the acoustic signal that arrives at the listener's ear? The answer to this question is important for phonetics, because various theories of speech perception predict different answers. S...

How far are vowel formants from computed vocal tract resonances?

We compare numerically computed resonances of the human vocal tract with formants that have been extracted from speech during vowel pronunciation. The geometry of the vocal tract has been obtained by MRI from a male subject, and the corresponding speech has been recorded simultaneously. The resonances are computed by solving the Helmholtz partial differential equation with the Finite Element Me...

Are their spectacles really necessary?

an experienced ophthalmic optician, I am also the Scottish representative of the British College of Ophthalmic Opticians and chairman of the National Optical Consultative Committee. The main defect in your editorial lies in the assumption that '80-90% of the prescriptions' for the 516 wearers of supposedly unnecessary spectacles out of 13 800 school children aged 10 years or less 'have been iss...

Vowel recognition: Formants, Spectral Peaks,

Vowel Perception with Virtual Formants

This study examines the potential role of the auditory spectral integration in phonetic vowel quality decisions. Synthetic stimuli included a “virtual formant (F2)” which was produced by inserting two pairs of sine waves below and above a “perceptual target frequency” (the spectral center-of-gravity, COG). Intensity weighting across the pairs of sine waves created a virtual F2, i.e., an F2 perc...