Speech acoustics vary due to differences in age, gender, vocal tract length, microphone, and so on. The authors recently have proposed a structural and abstract representation of speech, where these variations were effectively removed. In this study, a framework of speech synthesis based on this structural representation of speech is proposed. In the proposed framework, a system needs a “speech...

Cross-linguistically, vowel length contrasts may involve changes in vowel quality. In a different but more gradient way, speech style influences vowel articulation. While both alter vowel acoustics, it remains unclear whether both are byproducts of general processes of vowel undershoot or reflect a modification of articulatory gestures independent of durational constraints. This study investiga...

A statistical coarticulatory model is presented for spontaneous speech recognition, where knowledge of the dynamic, target-directed behavior in the vocal tract resonance responsible for the production of highly coarticulated speech is incorporated into the recognizer design, training, and in likelihood computation. The principal advantage of the new speech model over the conventional HMM is the...

We report on two listening tests to determine the speech quality of different wideband (WB) speech codecs. In the first test, we have studied various network conditions, including WB–WB and WB–narrowband (WB– NB) tandeming, packet loss, and background noise. In addition to other findings, this test showed some codec quality rank-order changes when compared to the literature. To evaluate the hyp...

Listeners identify talkers more accurately in their na­ tive language than an unknown, foreign language in a phenomenon called the language-familiarity effect. However, the psychological basis for this effect re­ mains unknown. Some have suggested that the linguistic processes involved in speech perception and comprehension facilitate native­language talker identification. Others have argued th...

We propose a new approach to nonuniform time compression, called Mach1, designed to mimic the natural timing of fast speech. At identical overall compression rates, listener comprehension for Mach1-compressed speech increased between 5 and 31 percentage points 2 over that for linearly compressed speech, and response times dropped by 15%. For rates between 2.5 and 4.2 times real time, there was ...

We investigated the effect of six background noise conditions (silent baseline, pink noise, monologue, lively conversation, one-sided phone call, and cocktail noise) on acoustic measures speech during story retells in people with aphasia. Eleven individuals aphasia 11 age- gender-matched control participants heard through headphones while they retold short stories. measured mean standard deviat...