Neurophysiological changes in the brain associated with major depression disorder can disrupt articulatory precision in speech production. Motivated by this observation, we address the hypothesis that articulatory features, as manifested through formant frequency tracks, can help in automatically classifying depression state. Specifically, we investigate the relative importance of vocal tract f...

An automatic method is proposed to estimate jointly formant and voice source parameters from a speech signal. A Rosenberg-Klatt model is used to approximate a voicing source waveform for voiced speech, whereas a white noise signal is assumed for the unvoiced. The vocal tract characteristic is represented by an IIR filter. The formant and anti-formant values are calculated from the IIR filter co...

Cognitive load measurement systems measure the mental demand experienced by human while performing a cognitive task, which is useful in monitoring and enhancing task performance. Various speech-based systems have been proposed for cognitive load classification, but the effect of cognitive load on the speech production system is still not well understood. In this work, we study formant frequenci...

Auditory scene analysis (ASA) is a theoretical framework that aims to explain the auditory perceptual organization. We test the hypothesis that formant continuity is used to link speech segments. Three experiments are described that investigate listeners’ ability to use the formant continuity cues to categorise the synthetic nasal /m/ and vowel-nasal syllables. The first experiment shows that, ...

PURPOSE This study systematically assessed the effects of select linear predictive coding (LPC) analysis parameter manipulations on vowel formant measurements for diverse speaker groups using 4 trademarked Speech Acoustic Analysis Software Packages (SAASPs): CSL, Praat, TF32, and WaveSurfer. METHOD Productions of 4 words containing the corner vowels were recorded from 4 speaker groups with ty...

This work examines the utility of formant frequencies and their energies in acoustic-to-articulatory inversion. For this purpose, formant frequencies and formant spectral amplitudes are automatically estimated from audio, and are treated as observations for the purpose of estimating electromagnetic articulography (EMA) coil positions. A mixture Gaussian regression model with mel-frequency cepst...

An acoustic analysis of the uvular unvoiced fricative in intervocalic sequences, as spoken in Arabic, is presented. Properties of both the noise region and voiced boundaries are examined, and several attributes are discovered: the glottal waveform changes considerably during its transition between the vowels and the fricative boundaries, with the open quotient becoming 100% at the boundaries co...

Acoustical analysis of speech and perceptual studies indicate that the dominant acoustic correlates of vowel perception are the frequencies of the first three formants. However, most vowels are not completely steady-state (even in isolation) and formant frequencies change with variation in the surrounding consonantal context, prosodic influences, speaking rate, and vocal tract length of the tal...

The goal of this study is to uncover significant factors in the classification of English stop consonant place of articulation, and determine their relative importance to the classification. Factor analysis arranges a set of acoustic attributes used for the classification into factors that can be interpreted in terms of articulatory attributes. Each factor is found to be comprised of attributes...

This paper compares ten vowels sounds across gender and accent. Each formant for each vowel was analysed individually across data sets, but no comparison was drawn directly between the formant relationship within each vowel. The objective here was to examine the formants individually across gender and accent to establish a method for transforming vowel quality in a rule-based synthesis system a...