PURPOSE Differences in vocal tract morphology have the potential to explain interspeaker variability in speech production. The potential acoustic impact of hard palate shape was examined in simulation, in addition to the interplay among morphology, articulation, and acoustics in real vowel production data. METHOD High-front vowel production from 5 speakers of American English was examined usi...

BACKGROUND Perception of speech is crucial in school where speech is the main mode of communication. The aim of the study was to evaluate whether a web based approach including listening tests and questionnaires could be used as a screening tool for poor classroom acoustics. The prime focus was the relation between pupils' comprehension of speech, the classroom acoustics and their description o...

The Institute of Speech Sciences and Phonetics at Halle University is currently working on a new dictionary of German pronunciation, including the development of a “talking dictionary”. This development is done in cooperation with the Laboratory of Acoustics and Speech Communication at Dresden University of Technology. For this purpose a preliminary study was conducted, using a high-quality spe...

This chapter reviews selected methods for pitch determination of speech and music signals. As both these signals are time variant we first define what is subsumed under the term pitch. Then we subdivide pitch determination algorithms (PDAs) into short-term analysis algorithms, which apply some spectral transform and derive pitch from a frequency or lag domain representation, and time-domain alg...

During the last decades, automatic speech processing systems witnessed an important progress and achieved remarkable reliability. As a result, such technologies have been exploited in new areas and applications including medical practice. In disordered speech evaluation context, perceptual evaluation is still the most common method used in clinical practice for the diagnosing and the following ...

Due to the demanding acoustic conditions in physical education lessons and the related problems with health and academic success, the aim of this study was to examine the acoustic conditions of teaching in sport halls in Slovenia. Thirtyfive sport halls were selected, reflecting four types of school sport halls grouped according to the period of their construction. The reverberation time was me...

Inter-speaker variability is pervasive in speech, and the ability to predict sources of inter-speaker variability from acoustics can afford scientific and technological advantages. An important source of this variability is vocal tract morphology. This work proposes a statistical model-based approach to classifying the shape of the hard palate and the pharyngeal wall from speech audio. We used ...

The quality of speech depends on how the speech is processed before it reaches the ears of the perceiving person. Considered in this work is the most common kind of processing the transmission of sound in a closed room. Room acoustics play an important role in the assessment of speech quality. The distance between two points in the room can be regarded as a digital transfer function. We subject...

Speech is the most important form of human communication but ambient sounds and competing talkers often degrade its acoustics. Fortunately the brain can use visual information, especially its highly precise spatial information, to improve speech comprehension in noisy environments. Previous studies have demonstrated that audiovisual integration depends strongly on spatiotemporal factors. Howeve...