Dysarthria is a speech motor disorder usually resulting in a substantive decrease in speech intelligibility by the general population. In this study, we have significantly improved the intelligibility of dysarthric vowels of one speaker from 48% to 54%, as evaluated by a vowel identification task using 64 CVC stimuli judged by 24 listeners. Improvement was obtained by transforming the vowels of...

The purpose of this study was to determine whether a change of one formant only is sufficient to shift the recognition of one vowel category to another. Two sets of vowel continua were constructed from a naturally produced /o/. In one continuum, F2 was varied to shift from /o/ to /e/, and in the other F1 was varied to shift from /o/ to /u/. Identification curves were then collected from 20 norm...

We conducted human language identification experiments using signals with reduced segmental information with Japanese and bilingual subjects. American English and Japanese excerpts from the OGI_TS Corpus were processed by spectral-envelope removal (SER), vowel extraction from SER (VES) and temporal-envelope modulation (TEM). With the SER signal, where the spectral-envelope is eliminated, humans...

Temporal processing abilities generally decline with age. These temporal processing declines may reduce the ability of older listeners to use temporal cues for spoken language processing, such as for segregating multiple talkers. A concurrent vowel paradigm was used to examine categorization judgments for young, middle-aged, and older listeners based on temporal onset differences. Listeners cat...

Consonant-vowel (CV) perception experiments provide valuable insights into how humans process speech. Here, two CV identification experiments were conducted in a group of hearing-impaired (HI) listeners, using 14 consonants followed by the vowel /ɑ/. The CVs were presented in quiet and with added speech-shaped noise at signal-to-noise ratios of 0, 6, and 12 dB. The HI listeners were provided wi...

This paper reports on the organization of the perceived vowel space in French. In a previous paper [28], we investigated the implementation of vocal height contrasts along the F1 dimension in French speakers. In this paper, we present results from perceptual identification tests performed by twelve participants who took part in the production experiment reported in the earlier paper. For each s...

Some differences in speech perception by native and nonnative listeners can be accounted for as transference from a native language. Others appear to result from universal preferences, such as duration. In the case of L2 vowel perception, duration may be used to categorize vowels when, from a non-native listener ́s perspective, inadequate spectral cues are available. The perception of Norwegian ...

To study the effects of frequency shifts on vowel identification, a high-quality vocoder (STRAIGHT) was used to process a set of vowels in /hVd/ syllables spoken by two adult males, two adult females, and two children. Vowel identification accuracy was reduced when the spectrum envelope was shifted upward by a factor of 2.0, or downward by a factor of 0.6. Upward shifts produced a smaller decli...

A set of three perceptual experiments is described. These experiments were designed to provide identification scores on CV sequences for French. Original stimuli were augmented with acoustic “monsters” where burst were excised or replaced. The first identification task shows that information carried by vocalic transitions can be overwritten by burst information. The importance of this phenomeno...