The present study systematically manipulated three acoustic cues--fundamental frequency (f0), amplitude envelope, and duration--to investigate their contributions to tonal contrasts in Mandarin. Simplified stimuli with all possible combinations of these three cues were presented for identification to eight normal-hearing listeners, all native speakers of Mandarin from Taiwan. The f0 information...

Context is important for recovering language information from talker-induced variability in acoustic signals. In tone perception, previous studies reported similar effects of speech and nonspeech contexts in Mandarin, supporting a general perceptual mechanism underlying tone normalization. However, no supportive evidence was obtained in Cantonese, also a tone language. Moreover, no study has co...

One production and one perception experiment were conducted to investigate the interaction of consonant voicing and fundamental frequency at the onset of voicing (onset f0) in Cantonese, a tonal language. Consonantal voicing in English can affect onset f0 up to 100 ms after voicing onset, but existing research provides inconclusive information regarding the effects of voicing on f0 in tonal lan...

A central issue in speech intonation research concerns how fundamental frequency (f0) variation relates to phonological categories. The hypothesis was tested that pitch range variation which affects whether one syllable is higher or lower than another would elicit categorical shifts in f0 extremum timing in an imitation task. Participants heard synthetic versions of the phrase Some lemonade wit...

The dependency of the timbre of musical sounds on their fundamental frequency (F0) was examined in three experiments. In experiment I subjects compared the timbres of stimuli produced by a set of 12 musical instruments with equal F0, duration, and loudness. There were three sessions, each at a different F0. In experiment II the same stimuli were rearranged in pairs, each with the same differenc...

We present a new method for the estimation of a continuous fundamental frequency (F0) contour. The algorithm implements a global optimization and yields virtually error-free F0 contours for high quality speech signals. Such F0 contours are subsequently used to extract a continuous fundamental wave. Some local properties of this wave, together with a number of other speech features allow to clas...

A scheme for modeling the F0 contour for different types of intonation units for the Slovene language is presented. It is based on results of analyzing F0 contours, using a quantitative model. Data from ten speakers was collected, resulting in a large corpora, mainly of declarative sentences. A way of generating the F0 contour for given utterances was defined, using only the text of the utteran...

This paper proposes an asynchronous model structure for fundamental frequency(F0) and spectrum modeling in HMMbased parametric speech synthesis to improve the performance of F0 prediction. F0 and spectrum features are considered to be synchronous in the conventional system. Considering that the production of these two features is decided by the movement of different speech organs, an explicitly...

Previous research shows that aspiration and sonorancy can have inconsistent consonantal effects on vowel F0 across languages, and even within the same language in different studies: they are reported to either lower F0, raise F0, or have neutral effects. This paper is interested in such inconsistent consonantal effects on vowel F0 in Cantonese and Mandarin. The results of a series of production...