conclusions the findings of this study offer information regarding the current dietary patterns among adolescent girls that can be used to design educational programs to promote healthy eating in this group. objectives the objective of this study was to examine the food consumption patterns of and obesity in female adolescents in khorramshahr high schools. materials and methods this cross-secti...

A significant body of evidence has accumulated indicating that vowel identification is influenced by spectral change patterns. For example, a large-scale study of vowel formant patterns showed substantial improvements in category separability when a pattern classifier was trained on multiple samples of the formant pattern rather than a single sample at steady state [J. Hillenbrand et al., J. Ac...

In this master thesis, the formant frequencies of an excellent male Swedish barbershop quartet were examined. The choice of topic was based on several factors that ought to make the tuning of the formant frequencies extremely important in the strive for the characteristic barbershop sound. The quartet was recorded, singing parts of the song 'Paper Moon'. In the recordings, each singer had an in...

PURPOSE To investigate regional dialect variation in the vowel systems of typically developing 8- to 12-year-old children. METHOD Thirteen vowels in isolated h_d words were produced by 94 children and 93 adults (males and females). All participants spoke American English and were born and raised in 1 of 3 distinct dialect regions in the United States: western North Carolina (Southern dialect)...

Acoustic manifestations of utterances vary according to the physiology of the speaker and the current underlying vocal tract settings as well as the rate and style chosen by the speaker. This may result in formant patterns for any given vowel being very different from those derived from citation forms for that speaker’s dialect. An examination of the acoustic signal arising from unscripted and ...

The mechanisms underlying directional asymmetries in vowel perception are a focus of debate. One account – the Natural Referent Vowel (NRV) framework – suggests that asymmetries reflect a language-universal phonetic bias, such that listeners are predisposed to attend to vowels with extreme articulatory postures, which display high formant convergence. A second account – the Native Language Magn...

We propose a novel method of generating a frequency warping function by mapping formant parameters of the source speaker and the target speaker. Alignment and selection process are performed to ensure that the mapping formants can represent speakers’ difference well. This approach requires only a very small amount of training data for generating the warping function, which can greatly facilitat...