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...

An earlier experiment requlrlng literal imitation of synthetic isolated vowels from [uJ-[iJ and [iJ-[a=J continua (Repp & Williams, 1985) was replicated using as stimuli vowels produced by the subj ects themselves. Even though imi tation accuracy was much improved, the responses deviated from the stimuli in ways similar to those observed previously with synthetic stimuli. That is, categorical t...

The engineered algorithms are presented for the detection of parasitic frequency modulation in audio originating from irregularities of sound carrier velocity. The algorithms were developed with special regard to non-periodic frequency modulation effects found in old movie sound tracks. The proposed algorithms consider the influence of the wow disturbance on the location of formants in time-fre...

Two experiments showed that continuity of the pitch contour is an important perceptual indicator that a formant pattern comes from a single speech source. Subjects listened to repeatedly played formant patterns that changed smoothly between two vowels. When the pitch was a monotone, these patterns were heard as containing semivowels and liquid consonants; but when a discontinuous, steplike pitc...

A significant fact about speech perception is that intelligibility is preserved when the spectrum is shifted up or down along the frequency scale, across a fairly wide range. To study the relationship between fundamental frequency (F0) and spectrum envelope shifts in vowel perception, we used a high-quality vocoder (STRAIGHT) to process a set of vowels spoken by 3 adult males in /hVd/ context. ...

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 ...